After all the sound and fury over allegations that the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election was rigged, Attorney General Terry Goddard announced today that a recount showed the sales-tax increase was, in fact, approved by voters.

This should put an end to all those allegations—based on what was, at best, flimsy evidence—that the county flipped the election. But it probably won’t.

Maricopa County election workers spent the better part of two weeks counting all the RTA ballots. However, before the count even began, election-integrity activists complained that chain-of-custody procedures weren’t followed when the ballots were taken to Maricopa County.

One final complaint, in a letter sent to Goddard by Pima County Democratic Party attorney Bill Risner, was that 19,000 ballots were possibly missing from the boxes. But earlier this week, activist John Brakey, after looking at six hours of video footage of the examination, determined the card stock used on the vote-by-mail ballots has a different thickness than that used on the regular ballots, which threw his back-of-a-napkin calculation off.

“I messed up,” Brakey told TW staff writer Mari Herreras. “I’m willing to take a hit for it.”

We’ll have more in this week’s Skinny and right here in The Range.

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Case Closed?

The attorney general says the RTA-election investigation is over, but activists still have concerns

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

2 replies on “AG: No Tampering In RTA Election”

  2. Copies of the rough cut for “Fatally Flawed” (a Sound and Fury Production featuring a guest appearance by Jim Nintzel) have been circulating all last week. It includes an ending with the statement:

    “After the count, Attorney General Terry Goddard
    announced that his office found no evidence of tampering of the RTA election”

    Cynically, perhaps pragmatically, we didn’t anticipate having to change the ending. This was a precarious time, actually, because it was very doubtful that Huckelberry would have to go down. I just couldn’t see it.

    But I could not predict that Goddard would stonewall so blatantly on the poll tapes and forensic analysis of ballots.

    Goddard admitted on the radio today (the Jolt) that he was aware of chain-of-custody issues with hard drives and electronic data for this election.

    Why would he not look at poll tapes and forensic data to evaluate the value of these ballots as evidence?

    We do know that (Cracked magazine has a lot of great lists, too):

    1. Goddard had the opportunity to perform these tasks.

    2. Goddard was informed of the necessity to perform these tasks.

    3. The choice by Goddard was to avoid these tasks.

    There’s a little more to March and Brakey’s infuriating missing ballot saga that I’m interested in finding out about soon.

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