Scattered among the thousand or so attendees of Saturday’s Maricopa County Republican Party’s annual meeting were people wearing “One Day, One Vote” t-shirts leftover from a push for a 2022 bill in the Legislature aimed at changing Arizona law to require, among other things, a hand count of every race on the Arizona ballot, with results delivered to the voters in 24 hours or less.
So, it came as little surprise to supporters of the idea that the normally perfunctory approval of the meeting’s rules turned into a donnybrook over whether the party would use its usual voting machines to count the ballots or if the entire process would be done by hand instead. Ultimately, a hybrid model was proposed and approved, but not before attendees had their patience tested by a debate that consumed an entire morning and set the meeting behind schedule by several hours.
“This was my first meeting,” said one frustrated participant, “and we just spent the entire day so far voting on how we were going to get to vote!”
To their credit, and in a demonstration of their persistence, the large crowd remained in place well into the evening as the event, which attendees were warned might go as late as 6 pm, went over by hours.
Opponents of the hand count concept were vindicated when only a few race outcomes were announced late that night, while the outcome of the remaining races, as well as votes on bylaw amendments and a handful of resolutions, were not able to be announced until the next day. Further complicating the counting was that according to the initial machine count, and confirmed by a subsequent hand count, more votes were cast than there were voters. How the extra ballots were distributed is unclear, but the crowd was not happy to hear that the problem had occurred.
“Either somebody cheated on purpose to stuff the ballot box, or something was done wrong and some of the people in this room accidentally got more ballots than they should have,” said one angry state committeeman, “but that means that the people who got more ballots than they should have voted them anyway, and that’s bullsh*t.”
When the smoke finally cleared, the new officers came largely from the so-called Truth Team that enjoyed endorsements from Kari Lake, State Senator Wendy Rogers, and newly elected State Representative Liz Harris. Craig Berland was elected Chairman, Shelby Busch was elected 1st Vice Chairman, and Lawrence Hudson was elected Treasurer.
The competing Arizona First slate of candidates also had high-profile endorsements from AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward, Congressman Andy Biggs, and State Senator Jake Hoffman, but only two of their candidates won – Tatiana Pena (2nd Vice Chair) and Dan Grimm (Secretary).