The cause of the provisional-ballot uproar has not been solved. At least, there doesn’t appear to be an agreement over the cause. Although Secretary of State Ken Bennett said one of the people involved in an effort to register 34,000 new Latino voters admitted that they were checking the permanent early-voting list box on registration forms without the voters’ knowledge, the details of that meeting are in dispute. Bennett’s spokesman Matt Roberts told New Times that this information — which Bennett presented to a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee a few weeks ago — came from a meeting with a few people who were concerned about the provisional-ballot issue.
Bennett has said that Latino voters did not end up casting provisional ballots at higher rates than other races, but did have that explanation for why some of those 34,000 new Latino voters may have showed up to the polls on Election Day, despite already being sent an early-voting ballot.
One of the organizers involved in the registration of those voters, and the meeting with Bennett, Unite Here! organizer Brendan Walsh, tells New Times that he doesn’t recall anyone saying that they were checking the permanent early-voting list box without the new voters’ knowledge.
“And that certainly was not what we trained our volunteers to do when registering voters,” Walsh says in an e-mail.
Walsh said that they did discuss early-voter registration in the meeting, and said both the community organizers and Bennett agreed that education and access to information for Latino voters might help solve some of the issues voters have had in the past with the early-voting registration.
Full Article: Ken Bennett’s Explanation of Provisional Ballot Issues Disputed by Organizer – Phoenix – News – Valley Fever.