By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Some national news topics were in the air when the Arizona Project Tea Party gathered here for its regular Monday evening meeting.
At the lectern, the group’s chairman, Ron Ludders, noted that embattled Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said he wanted to be a healer.
But, Ludders asked on February 11, “How can you be a healer and kill a newborn?” He referred to Northam’s shocking casualness in a recent radio interview when mentioning setting aside an aborted infant while deciding what to do about this new life.
Later during the Tea Party meeting, during questions from the audience, Veronika Corcoran, a woman who said she was born in Slovenia, and had the appropriate accent, told how important an honest voting process is to her. “Every illegal that comes and votes takes away our vote.”
She said she came to the U.S. legally and values the voting process, because back in Europe her family members had been murdered after they refused to join the Communist Party.
Corcoran declared her views after guest speaker Helen Purcell, the former Maricopa County recorder here, for the Phoenix metropolitan area, told the audience in some detail how her office had handled the voting process to ensure its integrity.
The possibility of fraudulent voting has been a concern voiced across the nation by both Republicans and Democrats.
Radical leftist Democrat Kyrsten Sinema’s victory for an Arizona U.S. Senate seat in 2018 left observers around the country scratching their heads — although some Arizonans said Sinema portrayed herself as bipartisan and projected a more personable image than her GOP foe, Martha McSally.
Purcell, a Republican who served as county recorder beginning back in 1989, finally was defeated for re-election in November 2016 by Democrat Adrian Fontes.
She had the reputation of a nonpartisan government official who wanted an honest vote, but challenger Fontes was able to capitalize on voter dissatisfaction after there were long lines waiting to cast ballots in Arizona’s March 2016 presidential preference primary.
Fontes narrowly defeated Purcell, by about one percent of nearly 1.4 million votes cast.
Once in office, Fontes developed the image of an aggressive partisan apparently unsuited to supervising ballot integrity. He became the topic of an extensive, 228-page review commissioned by the Arizona Republican Party of the November 2018 Maricopa County election process.
When preparation of the review was announced, the Daily Caller site said on November 16, “The Arizona GOP is not explicitly claiming fraud in its announcement, but says it hopes to use its report to better the process in future elections.”
This preliminary report, issued January 25, noted that Fontes’ office had not responded to three public-records requests, nor requests for interviews and questions regarding that office’s decisions, to assist in preparation of the report.
Although “emergency voting” for individuals traditionally was allowed here, Fontes broke precedent by opening five so-called “emergency voting centers,” all of them in precincts where registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans, four of them overwhelmingly so, the report said, while “emergency” was left undefined.
Moreover, Democrat Sinema’s campaign was said to have had advance knowledge of the centers’ opening and had time to prepare door leaflets encouraging voting there, while the Republican Party wasn’t informed of this.
Purcell was known to regard casting an emergency vote as being more than a matter of convenience granted for whatever a voter pleased. The story still circulates of how she once denied an emergency vote to conservative GOP Cong. J.D. Hayworth when he said he needed to be back in Washington, D.C., for his duties on Election Day.
Purcell replied that this conflict in scheduling was easily foreseen, and that Hayworth had plenty of time to cast an ordinary early vote instead. The report said:
“Under Purcell, the Recorder’s Office did not advertise the availability of emergency voting, and it did not open additional locations outside of the Recorder’s Office. Instead, emergency voting under Purcell was limited to voters who sought out the option and drove to the Recorder’s Office, or people who contacted the Recorder’s Office from, for example, a hospital, in which case Purcell would dispatch an officer to collect the person’s ballot.”
During the 2018 Arizona legislative session, Fontes supported bills to expand emergency voting, the report said, but when the legislature failed to provide for this, Fontes went ahead anyway: “it seems plausible that Recorder Fontes expanded emergency voting to partially accomplish what the Arizona legislature considered but refused to authorize.”
The report further noted that Fontes eagerly cooperated with Steve Gallardo, the one Democrat on the five-member Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, to open one of the emergency voting centers.
“By contrast,” the report added, “Republican Supervisor (Steve) Chucri said he was not consulted about the locations of the emergency voting centers, and he was not even informed of the expansion of the emergency voting centers prior to their public announcement.”
After Purcell finished her presentation to the February 11 Arizona Project Tea Party meeting, The Wanderer asked her a question from the floor: Given the matters raised in the GOP review, did she have any concerns about general-election integrity here in 2018?
“No, I don’t,” Purcell replied, adding that many of the people who worked for her as the recorder are still in place under Fontes.
Ludders, the Tea Party group’s chairman, had referred to Purcell as “one tough cookie” before he introduced her to the audience. However, after the meeting concluded, The Wanderer asked Ludders for his view of the elections’ integrity.
“I’m not sure that laws were broken, but that good, solid discretion was doubtful,” he replied. “. . . For instance, what was the (voting) emergency? How do we define ‘emergency’?”
Emergency voting should be for an individual, not a group, he said, and the fact that only one political party was aware the centers would be opening “was poor judgment.”
Earlier, Ludders told the audience that he attended the recent Chinese cultural festival here, where two men asked him, “Why is it that Republicans are such wimps? The moment the going gets tough,” they wimp out.
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