The fallout from Promoting Janet Napolitano

Jan Brewer is among the nation's worst Secretaries of State--a rabid partisan and (therefore) zealous foe of secular democracy. Like Florida's Katherine Harris and Ohio's Ken Blackwell, Brewer co-chaired her state's Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004 while also serving as Arizona's SoS: i.e., Arizona's top election officer.

And the results have been what you'd expect, as Arizona is a civic nightmare, whose electons are among the worst of all the states, and have been for some time.

The election reform movement in AZ has lately made great progress, against all odds and with great hardship. (Two months ago John Brakey was hustled off to jail in Pima County, for insisting on his right to monitor the handcount of some ballots there.)

Any further progress will be blocked, and all that recent progress could be nullified, if Brewer becomes the Queen of Arizona.

MCM  Napalitono's Move to the Obama Administration Would be a Nightmare Come True for AZ Voters

Nothing against Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D), but moving her to head of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration would be an enormous mistake, at least for the voters of Arizona who would be stuck with the horrible Sec. of State Jan Brewer (R) as Governor.

AZ has no Lieutenant Governor, so the rightwing loon Brewer --- one of the worst Secretaries of State in the nation --- would take the helm and serve as Sarah Palin to the state's slim Republican majority in the legislature should Napolitano take over at DHS as has been reported.

While turning the Governorship from Democratic to Republican before the important 2010 Congressional re-apportionment elections, in a battleground state like AZ --- and yes, it's a battleground state --- is bad enough, that's just one part of what makes installing Brewer as Governor such a horrible idea...

For just a small idea of how poorly Brewer has served her voters, we'll note first that she had the responsible for overseeing a transparent, fair and accurate Presidential Election for all AZ citizens this year, yet she had no problem standing on the floor of the Republican Convention in St. Paul to proudly announce the state delegation's vote for John McCain, putting him "over the top" to be the party's nominee.

That display of utter disregard for the importance of even the appearance of impartiality for a Sec. of State was an outrageous slap in the face to all of Arizona's voters.

But it doesn't stop there. Brewer signed the contract (see an incredible video here) to bring unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting systems into the state, long after they had been shown by computer scientists and security experts to be inaccurate, unreliable and easily tampered with. She has been aggressively opposed to virtually every move towards transparency and citizen oversight in her state's elections, in favor of purges and restrictions against legal voters at the polls, and even went as far as to publicly call her own citizens who spoke up against her embrace of the use of unverifiable Diebold voting machines "anarchists" and "conspiracy theorists".

She and her office have also blatantly lied to their citizens about their voting machines, and subsequently were so cowardly that they even refused to discuss the issue on air with us, in a setting friendly to them (because they know we would have called them on those lies.)

She is horrible. No matter how wonderful Napolitano might be in the role of DHS --- and we've got no opinion on that either way --- the citizens of Arizona, many of whom fought like hell for the election of Barrack Obama, even in John McCain's home state, do not deserve what they would be left with back home if she went to Washington.