"It ain't over 'til it's over..."

...and even then, it ain't over.

Maybe you thought the election ended a week ago. Maybe you thought that everything was settled. Maybe you thought that people like me would finally shut up. No such luck.

In Florida, for instance, the vote tally in the Presidential race wasn't known until this last weekend. (Obama won, by the way.) Florida has had its problems, as you may have heard.

What with extremely long lines in 2004, the Republican legislature, led by a Republican governor, removed early voting opportunities across the state, a policy that had greater influence in African-American communities, which appears to be what was intended. (Remember that Florida Governor Rick Scott tried to get more than 180,000 eligible voters thrown off the rolls (more than 1600 in Miami-Dade County alone) as "ineligible"...that's typical of the shenanigans that Scott and his people were up to this year.)

And "tea party" darling Allen West is refusing to concede defeat to Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy, despite the fact that 100% of the vote is in and the race has been called for Murphy. (With less that a 1% margin, I can't say I blame him.)

As it happens, Florida was the last state to certify the Presidential election results.

But besides the mess in Florida there's the mess in Arizona. ("Papers please" Arizona. Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Arizona.) As of this weekend, about 30% of Arizona's 1.8 million votes were uncounted; more than enough to swing several key races.

The US Senate race between Jeff Flake (R) and Richard Carmona (D) is still undecided, even though it's been called for Flake. But the margin, as of 4:00 this afternoon, is less than 80,000 votes...with half a million votes uncounted.

At least 350,000 of those uncounted votes are in Maricopa County (Phoenix et al) where controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in a close race for re-election. Too close to claim victory...but that hasn't kept Arpaio from claiming victory. His opposition isn't conceding.

(Interesting character, Arpaio...an article in Rolling Stone called him "...America's meanest and most corrupt politician.")

I said it's a mess, and it is...but it's not any kind of Earth-shattering crisis. The outcome of Arizona's Senate race, for example, isn't going to change the fact that the Democrats have held on to the Senate, or the fact that the Democrats haven't received that magic "supermajority" they need so badly. The Joe Arpaio question is a local one; whatever you think about the man, and however silly his continual questioning of Obama's birth certificate makes him look, on the national stage he doesn't even carry a spear.

This mess is important because both of these states are at the center of massive voter suppression efforts. I've mentioned some of Florida's woes (read more here) but those in Arizona are as bad if not worse. An article in The Huffington Post today stated, "The national media should feature this situation as a classic case study of the voter suppression network in high gear."

Jeff Flake's campaign used "robocalls" to direct Democrats to vote in the wrong precints, where according to Arizona law their votes wouldn't count.

In Maricopa County, voting instructions were sent out in Spanish giving the wrong date for the election.

The Huffington Post article cited "...an unmistakable pattern of Latino voter suppression."

What's really sad about all this is that in Arizona it may all actually work. Arpaio's race, while far from decided, will probably go his way. Carmona, Arizona's first Latino U.S. Senator, may well lose his job.

(Yes, I said it...they're about to send a Flake to Washington.)

In a perfect world, such tricks wouldn't work. In a perfect world, everyone who wanted to vote would be allowed to vote. This ain't a perfect world. But it's getting better, even in Arizona. The new-found strength of the Latino voting block, for example, must force Arizona's government to pay more attention to Latino concerns. And those horrible long lines to vote in Florida have resulted in calls to reform the election process, not just in Florida but throughout the country.

But even voter suppression works in Arizona, this year anyway, it didn't work well in Florida and it didn't work well in the rest of the nation. I think, I hope, that we're finally beyond the days when an  election could be turned by preventing people from participating in their government.

Well, maybe not in Arizona...

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.