AZ Primary Election: The numbers are a’changin’

Elected Precinct Committeemen are under siege again

The ponderous Primary Election count has continued long past Tuesday. Winners become losers and losers, winners as the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office processes thousands of mail-in and provisional ballots.

Congressional District 5 candidate Christine Jones, earlier considered the victor, appears to have lost by 9 votes — 29.47% to 29.48%  to former state Senate President Andy Biggs in the final tabulation early Saturday. Jones has already assembled a team of lawyers and election experts to mount a challenge to the updated numbers.

Even County Recorder Helen Purcell, who oversees elections, is not immune to the vagaries of ballot counting. She has also watched as her political light dimmed and brightened, first being declared the runner-up to challenger Aaron Flannery and then called as the winner by 185 votes— or 50.03% to his 49.97% — at the last count — Saturday 2:03 am.

All of the vote totals can be seen here.

Recounts, as spelled out in Arizona Revised Statutes, Title 16, Chapter 4, Article 12, are sure to be in the future.

If you ran for election as a precinct committeeman, your wait will be even longer. The final tabulation won’t be available until the proverbial cows come home — probably Wednesday Sept. 7. The elections take on larger significance since longtime PCs, the unpaid, grassroots workers of the political parties are once again having an elbow thrust in their gut, as the GOPe (establishment) is working with Team McCain to oust McCain disloyalists — real or imagined— from the party ranks. Concerted efforts include purposely overfilling the allotted number of committeemen allowed in each precinct and then either mailing out or hand delivering cards to households with the names comprising a “conservative slate.”  The maneuver is intended to aid the establishment by knocking actual conservatives off the roster. The fact that these are loyal Republican workers is of no consequence when it comes to the down in the weeds, devious schemes few would expect U.S. Senators to engage in.

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This is not a new phenomenon. Former Sen. Jon Kyl engaged in these underhanded tactics in 2012. As we pointed out at that time, the precinct committeemen elections are crucial since it is the elected precinct committeemen who elect the party leadership. Having conservatives in these posts hinders the efforts to have malleable stooges voted in to do the biding of the Republicrat honchos, who invariably push for amnesty immediately after they are reelected.

After McCain was censured by elected state committeemen at the 2014 annual Statutory Meeting of the State Committee of the Arizona Republican Party, he undertook a mission to replace conservatives. His scheming with out-of-state Obama donors made the national news. Read about his tyrannical tactics in Front Page mag, Breitbart. and POLITICO.