re: Many Republicans just didn’t vote for the Republican candidates in Arizona

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C’mon. The chaos as soon as the polls opened. The ‘toner’ settings being oddly off.. this was frickery at the base level.

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You're genuinely shocked the government can frick routine shite up? That a gov't bureaucrat might get toner setting wrong?

Here's what I know, and some of it is different from what has been posted ad nauseam on this board.

Elections are run by counties, not the state or Secretary of State (Katie Hobbs), so the notion that it was Hobbs' people/employees running elections is patently false.

Counter to popular belief, Maricopa county is f'n Republican. Understand that Phoenix, which is liberal, makes up only a third of Maricopa county. There are more Republicans in Maricopa county than Democrats. So we're not talking about some wildly liberal urban area.

Maricopa county Board of Supervisors are responsible for conducting elections. There are five seats on the board, and four are held by Republicans. 80% of the body responsible for elections is Republican.

The top election managers are Republican.

On the state level, we have a Republican governor, Republicans control both state houses (and have for 30 straight years), a Republican AG. Katie Hobbs is the only Dem at the state level.

Regarding "chaos at the polls" - I was there. I voted at noon and had a ZERO wait to get checked in/ID check, ZERO wait to get my ballot printed, ZERO wait for a voting booth, and ZERO wait to scan my ballot through a tabulator.

When the tabulator issue first started to be reported, I was on a thread on this board and wanted to see for myself if waiting times were bad - I looked on the site that reports waiting times in real time, and the vast majority of voting centers showed less than 20 minute waits. There was a handful showing 30-40. There wasn't more than a few that showed more than that, and none showed more than 80 minutes.

Later in the afternoon I checked this again, same thing.

It got busier later in the day, but unlike what's apparently/often believed on this site, as long as you were in line when polls closed, you got to vote. So unless the argument is that freeways were tied up and people couldn't get to polls, the argument that voters were disenfranchised by polls closing isn't reasonable.

The tabulators - several threads on this site have discussed them, but what's lost in the BS is that each voting center had multiple tabulators. Most had 3, some of the smaller ones/smaller surrounding population had two.

On this board yesterday there was "reporting" that because 70 (or so) tabulators malfunctioned in 120-something voting centers meant 65% of tabulators malfunctioned. This isn't true because, as I stated above, each voting center had 2 or (more often) 3 tabulators. Something around 25% of tabulators malfunctioned. Not that that's immaterial, I'm just laying out what actually happened.

So voting centers that had a malfunctioning tabulator simply used the tabulator sitting next to the one that's BO. In and of itself, not a big deal as long as it didn't involve a big wait. There was some reporting that at some voting centers, voters were asked to wait or drop their ballot in Box 3.

Is Box 3 an issue? Maybe. Nobody has been able to explain, good or bad - a) how many ballots were dropped in Box 3's, and b) what did they look like vote count-wise? What we do know is that Box 3 ballots were transported/counted under supervision of Republican poll-watchers and lawyers.

To be clear here, I'm not arguing that I know there was no frickery. I'm telling you that at this moment in time, nobody has found a smoking gun, though I do think there's a legit question about commingling some Box 3 ballots with ballots that had already been counted that has not been answered.

Moreover, I don't know why the judge that said no to extending poll hours didn't say yes - whether the request was totally legit or not, why not err on the side of being accommodating?

By the way, harvesting ballots in AZ is illegal. The video we've seen of a dozen cars dropping off several ballots is not inconsistent with the law that says a person can drop off ballots for immediate family members or as caregivers. I don't think there's been any suggestion that actual vote harvesters were active in Maricopa county. Has anybody seen something different?

Because there was so many questions falling out of 2020, I paid attention to all the legislation (made harvesting illegal, tightened up ID), rollout, early voting and voting day. Nothing that's being discussed in social media/PT strikes me as the smoking gun we need unless there's a big unknown still.

IMO, outside of changing votes somewhere in the system, the only way Dems could cheat in volume would be to create ballots for registered voters that did not vote. This would require having an account of who voted and finding in the voter rolls thousands of registered voters that didn't vote in this election, then filling out a ballot for them and throwing it on the pile. This would have to be done by elections staff, right? So it would have to be done under the supervision of Republicans, and under the watch of Republican (and Dem) poll watchers and lawyers. Maybe that's what happened? But I don't think that should be too hard to prove, and we don't have that yet. Hopefully it's in the offing.

Last thing - look down ballot. Arizona passed a measure to let illegals that graduated from Arizona high schools go to state universities at in-state tuition rates. We also voted down a measure that would have further tightened up voter ID rules. The voting margin in both cases was slim. On the other hand, a proposition barely passed that requires a 60% affirmative vote for any ballot proposition that involves taxes.

That's a mixed bag. A tightly contested mixed bag.