The blog Fourth Estate 48 reports on news from Arizona. The latest news is that Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for Secretary of State, wants to abolish voting by mail. He peddles the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and mail-in voting was a source of fraud.
Well, Dillon Rosenblatt checked Finchem’s voting record and found that he regularly votes by mail.
The Secretary of State in every state is in charge of elections. He or she must be a person of the highest integrity and must be nonpartisan.
Rosenblatt writes:
During his Arizona PBS debate for Secretary of State, Republican nominee said he always goes to the polls to vote. He lied.
Up until this year, Mark Finchem, the conspiracy theorist, stop the steal, election denying Republican candidate for Arizona Secretary of State automatically received his ballot via the mail since he was a Libertarian in 2008.
Despite that, Finchem has been a strong advocate of ending no-excuse mail-in voting for all Arizonans which has been in place for decades and used by at least 80% of the electorate. Finchem during his debate against Democratic challenger Adrian Fontes, the former Maricopa County recorder, last month claimed he always votes at the polls. This is a lie.
In another post, Dillon Rosenblatt reported that Republican Candidate for the U.S. Senate, Blake Masters, always votes by mail. But he’s against it, like Finchem.
In last night’s Arizona Senate debate on Arizona PBS between Senator Mark Kelly, the Democrat, Blake Masters, the Republican, and Marc Victor, the Libertarian, Masters went after the state’s vote by mail system –– a system which he utilizes exclusively.
Masters at first said, “I believe in Election Day, not election season,” but his voter file shows he’s never actually voted on Election Day while he was registered to vote in Arizona.
Masters has not lived in Arizona for long, but he has always voted by mail.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hypocrites! E about anything connected to the Premeditated, Manufactured Lie… and attempted Coup
Finchem and Masters are just examples of how Republicans are following Trump’s example that lying is acceptable if it gets me the votes I need to be elected or re-elected to a political position in this country. What an ugly examples for the young people of this country.
If we do away with voting by mail then we will be denying all the service men and women who serve overseas their constitutional right to vote. These are the very citizen of this country that help to defend the country and it democratic way of life. Not only will our military service members be denied the right to vote but there are thousands of US citizens that live in foreign counties to provide the service members with many needed services. They too will be denied the right to vote.
I served many years overseas. My wife and I always voted by mail. We have family members serving right now in Italy that would be denied the right to vote if these type of fools get their way.
But fools like Trump, Fincem, and Masters really do not care about who will be denied the right to vote as long as they remain in office.
In Florida, now, if you want to continue getting a mail-in ballot, you have to check a box on the envelope for your ballot. Otherwise, you are taken off the list. They’ve redesigned the mail-in ballot envelope so that if the flap is closed, the check-off box for continuing to receive a mail-in ballot is hidden beneath the envelope’s flap, where people can’t see it to check off the box. Any little thing to discourage mail-in balloting. Ofc, it isn’t just service people overseas who depend upon mail=in balloting; it’s also elderly people and people with disabilities and people who are poor who don’t have ready and easy access to cars to drive themselves to the polls.
Ofc, election fixing in the US is nothing new, and it’s long been a bipartisan affair. It’s only in our time that the Repugnican Party has become the major perpetrator, at the same time that it cries “Election fraud” based on zero evidence, in a time when our elections are more secure and accurate and fair than ever before. In the 19th century, the practice of getting people drunk and taking them to vote for your candidate multiple times in exchange for the drinks was so common that it was given a name: cooping. It may be that Edgar Allan Poe died as a result of excessive alcohol intake due to cooping. There’s a wonderful song by Steve Goodman called “Daley’s Gone,” about the first Mayor Daley of Chicago–a guy who built an elevated highway with a wall beneath it to wall off the black parts of the city:
When John Kennedy wanted to be president,
he knew what to do.
He called up Mayor Daley because he was Irish, too.
Daley’s gone, one more round, Daley’s gone.
When I was a kid, people used to say that when Lyndon Johnson was a representative and later senator from Texas, after every election, every low place in the state of Texas was filled with a ballot box that had gone missing. LOL. Look up “Box 13 Scandal.”
Ofc, right now, rightwingers are trying to do away with drop boxes and mail-in ballots and polling places in POC communities and much more in order to fix voting based on claims that election fraud is rampant now. It isn’t. Even Bill Barr says that the last presidental election was the most secure and fair in our history, and the Brennan Center estimates instances of voter fraud in the US at between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.
Nineteenth Century elections were warped affairs. Once, when I was looking for other material in a local newspaper, I noticed a very telling comment on the election of 1888: “for the first time in many years, there was no violence at the polls this year”
So many in the Russia RepubliQan party now work only to discredit safe fair elections and to corrupt democracy from the inside out. It is their only path to install their feted fetid white dictatorship. The thought of any POC and/or Democrat being elected to lead so rankles their parochial Fox-fed racism that they would rather burn everything down and let anarchists and oligarchs rule lest the Will of the People be done as the Constitution demands. And all this for a failed steak salesman/treasonous Putin puppet who steals our nation’s secrets and foments violent insurrection against the United States. America must excise this cancer from the body politic or prepare itself for the inevitable mysterious Liberal defenestrations to begin….
“Dillon Rosenblatt checked Finchem’s voting record and found that he regularly votes by mail.
….
During his Arizona PBS debate for Secretary of State, Republican nominee said he always goes to the polls to vote. He lied.”
Actually, not necessarily.
It is possible that Finchem always goes to the polls and votes by mail.
Indeed, that may be the source of his certainty that there is fraud involved with voting by mail.
As Maya Angelou said, “when people tell you who they are , believe them the first time”
When Finchem says he goes to the polls (perhaps pretending to be a someone who is now deceased?) and the record shows he votes by mail, take his word for it.
If we end up with Finchem, Masters and Lake we are doomed. I love Arizona, but I am scared for our future.
Sharon,
You are right.
Arizona has an unusually horrible slate of Trumpists and election deniers on the ballot.
They are all reprehensible.
I read yesterday that Lake could be a candidate for VP on a Trump ticket.
She lies as much and as well as he.