WARNING – ANGRY POLITICAL RANT FOLLOWS:
By now you’ve probably read an article or two about the absolute disaster of painfully obvious voter disenfranchisement and outright primary election-rigging that happened a couple of days ago in Arizona. 800,000 voters in Maricopa County where I live were forced to spend all day waiting in lines at just 60 polling places (the other 140 that the county normally has were closed down to “save money”) with some voters waiting past midnight to cast a ballot after polls closed at 7pm. Most were simply turned away or given provisional ballots that likely won’t be counted.
Additionally, thousands of long-time Democratic voters showed up at the polls only to find that their party affiliation had been mysteriously switched to Independent, leaving them unable to vote at all after waiting hours in line (Arizona doesn’t allow Independents to vote in primaries, effectively disenfranchising more than 60% of the voters in the state). When asked about the massive screw-ups, County Recorder Helen Purcell blamed “the voters, for getting in line” before rapidly backtracking after realizing what she’d just said (and yes, there’s a petition you can sign to have that leathery old c*nt fired). When the County Recorder in charge of the election doesn’t bother to hide her dislike of voters actually showing up to vote, you gotta know that something’s wrong.
So if you wondered why Arizona managed to somehow get called for Trump and Clinton before the votes had even been cast, let alone tallied, while other states that had primaries on Tuesday waited until the votes had actually been counted before being called for Sanders, well, wonder no more. They didn’t even try all that hard to pretend that the voters mattered at all. And you know what? We don’t.
END ANGRY POLITICAL RANT
(and back to your regularly scheduled program of calm, happy-making posts on typewriters and such.)
Addendum: and because there isn’t enough soul-wrenching depravity going on in the world, here’s an article about an artist turning old typewriters into guns: “Is mightier than…“
Yep. Lucky for me I can break away from work at will and drive to three polling places, all over Mesa/Chandler, in order to find one with parking – then wait in line for 2 hours. My wife and daughter (who would have been casting her first vote) were not so lucky. I’m encouraging them to lodge complaints with the ACLU.
There is so much that is distressing in this post. I read it and went in search of balm for my troubled soul. Down the street at the local junk shop, I picked up another of Tim’s dirty typewriters – a really sweet Remington 5. I am going to spend my evening cleaning that dirty typewriter. On breaks, I’ll go outside and pet our feral cat.
yeah, it’s pretty sick-making, and I would normally keep my opinions to myself on these matters, but this was one day that really set off my “this is WRONGWRONGWRONG” alarms. I’m seriously wishing we could get a do-over, but that’s not in the cards. I went out and got a watch, though, as my own balm. (:
At least you do not live in a communist state like I do. In Virginia I could vote in any election. Here in Florida (and when I lived in PA) I am not allowed to vote because I do not belong to the party and if I did I’d then need to vote for the party. Just like commies! I refuse to associate myself with either of the major parties and I will let my rant for later. Maybe on my blog. I do hope Bernie beats both the untrustworthy one and the bombastic one.
Oh – it’s like that here too, Bill. Voters registered as “Independent” are not allowed to vote in the primary. That’s about 30% of the voters in Arizona (Many of which would have voted Bernie).
Appalling.
Fred Woodworth, who publishes The Match! in Tucson using a Varityper, never votes, since he considers it a distraction and an illusion. Which is plausible enough, but I still try to do my civic duty.
Interesting (and disturbing) developments down in AZ. Just saw that Hillary, Bernie and the party are filing a lawsuit late Thursday.
We have an open primary in Montana — you can declare at the polls — but the TEA party faction is trying to make it a “members only” affair. They failed in state courts and there’s a lot of friction within the state GOP about it.
Seems like a dumb strategy to me. Nothing motivates apathetic voters like the prospect of taking their vote away.
Here here! The system is rigged, and the good thing about Arizona (if we look for the good in the bad), is that now a huge population knows it and are already very motivated to do something about it.