Arizona Taking Even Longer To Count Votes Than Florida, Which May Get Unearned Sense Of Competence

Arizona appears to be ahead in the race to the bottom of the electoral-competence barrel, yay! Nearly a week after the election, hundreds of thousands of votes were still waiting to be tallied. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the mess appears to be at least in part a result of the state's efforts tosuppress minority votingenhance ballot security, resulting in a large number of provisional ballots that must be verified by hand. Early votes also make up a large portion of the uncounted ballots, which you would think is a little odd since they were, you know, early and stuff.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s [sic] said Saturday that approximately 486,405 ballots still have to be counted across the state, representing more than a quarter of the 1.8 million votes cast. About 322,000 of those uncounted ballots came from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and many of its suburbs. The statewide total included 307,620 early ballots and 178,785 provisional ballots.

Among the fallout from the electoral clusterfuck, the race for the newly created 9th Congressional District was only decided today, resulting in a win for Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who becomes the "first openly bisexual member of Congress." (Spokesbeards for several serving members said only "Shhhh.") Her election is also expected to result in several accidental Google hits for the French critical journal Cahiers du Cinema. 

In the race for the 2nd District seat formerly held by Gabrielle Giffords, it now looks like DemocratDonRON Barber (we need new glasses, maybe), the Giffords staffer who also survived the shooting and won the special election to temporarily fill the seat, is ahead by a slim margin over Republican Martha McSally. Or at least he was, as of a few hours before this story according to CNN, which has Barber ahead by a whopping 330 votes, with god knows how many yet to count.

The Arizona branch of the ACLU politely asked state and county elections officials to see if maybe they could try not to let the state's Voter ID law completely screw over minority voters if it wouldn't be too much trouble, please. The New York Times noted that

among the 115,000 voters who cast provisional ballots in Maricopa County on Tuesday were many first-time minority voters who signed up to get their ballots by mail, but never did.

However, did the New York Times consider that maybe the Latinos were totally just lying and were too lazy to fill out their absentee ballots, because of laziness, and the way they lie all the time?

We suppose it would also be just pure racist madness to point out that Maricopa County happens to be the location where, oops! the county election officials sent out voter information materials with the wrong date on the Spanish side of the card.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has pledged to ensure a fair tally of the uncounted ballots by launching an investigation into Barack Obama's college transcripts.

[ TPM / ABC News / CNN / NYT ]