Judge Finds Manipulation in Recall Vote in Arizona

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Topic subject Judge Finds Manipulation in Recall Vote in Arizona
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Judge Finds Manipulation in Recall Vote in Arizona
Posted by pampango on Sat Oct-08-11 02:55 PM
Source: New York Times

At first glance, it had the makings of a spirited election: the leader of Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration facing off at the polls with an immigrant from Mexico who believed that the state had gone too far. But the immigrant, Olivia Cortes, a retiree who filed papers in July to challenge the State Senate president, Russell Pearce, disappeared from the political scene last week just as quickly as she had appeared. Ms. Cortes’s candidacy for a legislative district in this working-class community east of Phoenix, it now appears, had been a dirty trick.

Critics of Mr. Pearce’s hard-line approach to illegal immigration collected enough signatures to force him into a recall election in November. But allies of Mr. Pearce, who is one of the state’s most powerful politicians, did not take that humiliation lightly. They recruited Ms. Cortes in what was an effort to split the anti-Pearce vote, particularly among Latinos, a judge later found.

The judge, Edward O. Burke of Superior Court of Maricopa County, declined to remove her from the ballot but did say that the evidence suggested that some of her so-called supporters really supported Mr. Pearce. “The court finds that Pearce supporters recruited Cortes, a political neophyte, to run in the recall election to siphon Hispanic votes from Lewis to advance Pearce’s recall election bid,” the judge said in his ruling.

At a debate on Thursday that was supposed to be Ms. Cortes’s first public appearance in the race, there were only two candidates, Mr. Pearce and Mr. Lewis. They clashed on immigration, with Mr. Pearce arguing that illegal immigrants are a burden on the state and Mr. Lewis pushing for what he called a more humane approach on the issue.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/politics/judge-finds-manipulation-in-recall-vote-in-arizona.html


If Cortes " opposes “what she believes is Pearce’s harsh legislative treatment and comments about illegal Hispanic immigrants”, I wonder why she agreed to help Pearce.

That whole story is odd, and I'd love to hear the truth. How did they recruit someone who strongly opposes that nut-job's positions to run, when clearly the only person to benefit would be Pearce?