We have attempted to avoid any partisan political issues on our blog.
It appears that there may be some readers that believe the RTA issue is "old news" and may be considered a "partisan" political issue.
We believe otherwise. We believe the issue of voter transparency is too important to ignore.
As our new blogger, Brad Friedman who writes a nationally renown blog, http://www.bradblog.com/ wrote here in a recent comment---
"Election Integrity is not about "trust" or "credentials", it's about transparency and oversight and your *right*, as a citizen, to *know* that your favorite candidate -- or least favorite -- won or lost in *your* public elections. If you find yourself having to trust in someone -- anyone, whether it be an election officials, a voting machine company, or an EI advocate -- rather than being able to see things for yourself, then something has gone terribly wrong. As it has in Pima (and in much of the nation)."
As for our recent mayoral election, Brad wrote---
"It's quite possible that the mayoral election you all are discussing came out *exactly* as has been reported. It's also quite possible that it didn't. Nobody should have to *guess* which one of those is the case. Citizens should be able to *know*, for themselves -- without needing to "trust" in someone who has a personal stake in the reporting system used for the results, or in a rocket/computer scientist -- that their election has been accurately tabulated."
We are not discussing a "partisan" political issue. We are discussing a political issue that all citizens, and especially Oro Valley voters should be concerned about.
We hope that is the case.
10 comments:
Check out the front page of the AZ Daily Star today regarding the RTA. Steal an election and then, as predicted, the costs go up by $250 million and 25% of the work or more won't get done. It was all a con from the start imho. Did anyone watch Arizona Illustrated the other night? Apparently the RTA folks are upset with the city council in Tucson for having many public meetings to get citizen input. They would rather the citizens just shut up and let them do what they will with our money.
dfa-- Thanks. The article was posted this morning and is below this post.
Art
Notice To Bloggers:
Our blog is a "no hijack" blog. We will remove any comment, regardless of its nature, that has a click link to another site that results in replacing our blog's page with a page from another site.
Bloggers may post links that are the entire URL or a click link that results in opening a new browser page to that site.
Dear Readers--- I removed the above post by "doyousmellthat?" because it added absolutely nothing to the subject.
While opposite points of view are welcome, we will remove any comments WE believe to be inappropriate and worthless.
Art
The answer to the question, "Is the RTA Discussion Worthy of Being Addressed on Our Blog?" is YES and here's why.
From an article on the website of Tucson Weekly...
What are poll tapes and why do they matter? Poll tapes are receipts that are printed in each precinct at the end of the election night. They contain the vote totals that indicate the results for that particular precinct.
Once printed, election workers verify the authenticity of the poll tape and its totals by signing the bottom of each poll tape. For this reason, poll tapes could serve an important auditing function, especially in conjunction with examining the ballots.
Earlier posts and national media news sources report that a number of poll tapes from the 2006 RTA election are missing. Here are the actual numbers:
Out of 368 memory cards representing 409 precincts, there are 112 poll tapes missing, which represent 122 precincts. This is approximately 30 percent of the precincts counted.
102 additional supporting documents (yellow sheets) are missing.
50 of the polltapes that were found do not match the final canvas.
Why is this significant? Because it utterly discredits Attorney General Terry Goddard's investigation, it renders the RTA investigation incomplete and IT UNDERSCORES THE LACK OF CONFIDENCE IN PIMA COUNTY ELECTIONS.
(The last 10 words connect the dots to the recent OV mayoral election. You can read the entire article on the LOVE Blog, left hand column, Missing Poll Tapes).
I wonder how much it costs to have bumper stickers printed?
PIMA COUNTY, STILL CORRUPT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
PIMA COUNTY: WHERE YOUR VOTE DON'T COUNT
PIMA COUNTY: VOTE? WHY BOTHER.
From the same Tucson Weekly article:
"Now we have a recent mayoral election in Oro Valley sporting very peculiar numbers.
For this Oro Valley race, vote by mail consisted of 66.68 percent of the total vote. Within the 66.68 percent of the mail-in votes, Mike Zinkin was ahead by approximately 53 percent to Satish Hiremath's 47 percent. Within the remaining 33.32 percent of the votes, Hiremath was in the lead by 55.87 percent to Zinkin's 43.77 percent.
This makes the spread between vote-by-mail and all the rest of the votes as large as 9 percent. A spread that has never been seen before in Pima County's election history. With this difference, Hiremath won the Oro Valley Mayoral race.
Is an anomaly just an anomaly? Given what I and many others know about the Pima Elections Division, there's likely more to this story."
Is this simply going to be a rehash of a previous stream? The RTA election validity question was hacked to death on one of the previous ones and if that is to continue it will serve only to cloud the subject of today's revelations which are pertinent as to TODAY'S news and, in my opinion, should therefor be open for discussion.
Allow me to opine on the initial question.
NO!
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