Woke Progressive Oversees the Election in Critical Arizona County
While the focus of the 2022 election in Arizona remains on Maricopa County, I’m more worried about Pima County, which includes Tucson, with its history of shady deals and back door politics, including the audacious Rio Nuevo debacle of the early 2000s.
If you’ll recall, Arizona was at the center of the fraud allegations that tainted the 2020 election. Some of the most serious charges came from political and former DoD analyst, Ray Blehar, who provided time-stamped evidence of two 8 p.m. data dumps on election night, which gave Biden more votes than he received for the entire election in Maricopa County. The vote totals were eventually corrected within the county, but according to Blehar, the final tally for all of Arizona was not, which means 120,000 excess Biden votes might have been shifted into other counties.
That’s where Pima County would have come into play.
According to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, MIT PhD, in 2020, Pima County had a mail-in ballot return rate that was 15.6% higher than the national average and 19% higher than the Arizona average. Several precincts had an impossible 90%+ return rate, and the farther those precincts crept past 90%, the more the Biden vote increased disproportionately.
We’ll probably never know for sure if the excess Biden votes from Maricopa County were actually shifted into Pima County, but unanswered questions led to a loss of confidence in the tabulating process, and those doubts carried over into the 2022 midterms.
The Recorder is the Election Czar in Pima County
In Pima County, the Recorder is responsible for overseeing all election operations. After 28 years in office, F. Anne Rodriguez, a Democrat, retired in 2020 right after that election. She had nearly three decades to build a partisan bureaucracy inside the Recorder’s office. Still, despite her bias, Rodriguez was an “old school” Democrat. That’s why Republicans in Pima County weren’t relieved when she stepped away. They feared that her replacement would be much worse, and they weren’t disappointed.
If Rodriguez was a partisan hack, the new County Recorder, Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, is a poster child for the woke faction of the Democratic party. In her bio, Cazares-Kelly boasts about her background and activism.
“I am a dues-paying union sister and #RedForEd public school educator, a grassroots organizer, and lifelong Pima County resident.”
“I am committed to creating and transforming spaces to include Indigenous voices and the voices of those who are historically underrepresented in our county. I am a 2018-2019 Tucson Public Voices Fellow, a 2019 Monzón Fellow and a 2020 Emerge Candidate. In 2019, I was the recipient of the Dolores Huerta – Mujer En La Lucha Award and was named the Arizona AFL-CIO’s Community Activist of the Year.”
“I have worked in Native American institutions for over 14 years, mostly in higher education, but more recently at the high school level. I was a member of the Arizona Board of Regents Academic Advising Articulation Task Force for 9 years and am currently an Advisory Board member for the Education Policy Center at the University of Arizona.”
Three Things to Keep the Pima County Recorder from Rolling Her Eyes at Your White Privilege
Cazares-Kelly wears her woke activism like a badge of honor. She seems obsessed with injecting Native-American grievance into every facet of her life. Seeking to protest in perpetuity, she participated in the Rez for Ed Teacher Walk-outs on tribal reservations. Cazares-Kelly objects to “invasive questions,” and continually portrays herself as a victim, although she seems to have been provided enough opportunity and financial aid to earn a graduate degree.
Yet, to me, the most disturbing aspect of the new Pima County Recorder is a piece she published in 2018 titled, “3 Things to Keep Me From Rolling My Eyes at Your White Privilege.” In it, Cazares-Kelly complains about dealing with a seemingly endless array of “microaggressions and unknowingly racist comments” from ignorant white people. Incredibly, she finds racism in innocuous remarks, such as, “You’re well-spoken” or “articulate.” Like most woke progressives, Cazares-Kelly appears to spend her life in a perpetual state of hyper-sensitive awareness, just waiting to be offended and unable to simply shrug or laugh-off harmless comments from well-meaning people desperately trying to gain her approval.
Even if some of her ideas about bridging the racial divide make sense, it’s her flawed perception that outward appearance has an impact on motivations and actions that is most troubling, especially for someone overseeing an election with national implications.
Pima County and the 2022 Election
As of this writing, approximately 125,000 votes remain uncounted in Pima County. Cazares-Kelly has indicated that we shouldn’t expect a result until November 15th, at least one day later than Maricopa County claims they will have finished processing all of their remaining ballots.
That means the winner of the race for Senate and Governor in Arizona could ultimately come down to the final vote totals from Pima County under the direction of Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, which frankly, makes me much less confident in the outcome.
