Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been frittering away his remaining days on this planet by glomming onto the birther idiocy for publicity and chasing dishwashers and gardeners while dangerous sex offenders roam free.
Meanwhile, a small army of high-school kids (mostly), funded by union bucks and led by veteran organizers has been quietly, doggedly engineering his downfall.
See also: -Joe Arpaio-Foe Paul Penzone Blasts Sheriff's Hypocritical New Ad -Arpaio Snuggles Up to an Ex-Inmate in His Cynical Bid for a Sixth Term -Will the $100 Million Hole Joe Arpaio Dug Kill Him in the 2012 Election? -Victims Wonder Why Arpaio Let Sex-Abuse Cases Languish -Ex-Police Chief's Book Details Arpaio's Negligence in El Mirage Cases -Inhumanity Has a Price -Joe Arpaio on the Run from Paul Penzone -Joe Arpaio-Stooge Mike Stauffer Is "Olivia Cortes on Steroids," Says Randy Parraz
That group calls itself Adios Arpaio and yesterday it announced that it had registered more than 20,000 new voters: 21,571, to be exact.
(Note: I have asked county elections to confirm this count, and should have an answer by Monday. I will update this blog at that time.)
To celebrate, a delegation of those young men and women delivered empty boxes to Arpaio's pricey 19th floor offices in the Wells Fargo Building downtown.
Why? To help him move, of course, when he loses his bid for a sixth unprecedented term on November 6.
Adios Arpaio spokeswoman Daria Ovide told me the voter registration campaign -- made up of 400 volunteers and about 20 paid staff -- has been focusing on signing up Latinos.
The volunteer canvassers haven't been tracking the party affiliations of registrants, but she's certain that most of these new voters are likely to cast a ballot against Arpaio.
"We're pretty clear about what our goal is," she explained. "[We tell people], `If you want to get involved in defeating Arpaio in November, the first step is to register to vote.'
"One thing we know is that everyone we've registered is most-likely an anti-Arpaio voter...The majority of the people we've been registering are Latinos. Beyond that we're not tracking."
But more important than party affiliation is that these 20,000 people want a new sheriff and are signed up for the county's Permanent Early Voting List.
Adios Arpaio drills the importance of PEVL into its canvassers, uses new registration forms with a check-off box for PEVL, and encourages people to sign up for PEVL, if they want.
The significance of signing people up for PEVL is that it is of enormous assistance in the all-important get-out-the-vote effort, wherein a group like Adios Arpaio will repeatedly contact voters and urge them to send in their ballots, or to fill them out and hand them over to AA's workers for delivery.
Many of Adios Arpaio's volunteers are the sons and daughters of those dishwashers and day-laborers that Arpaio's beige-shirted goons have been chasing.
Which means that every time Arpaio performs another immigration raid on a restaurant or a car wash or whatever, he's adding fuel to his own auto-da-fe by giving the children of his victims more motivation to topple him.
Two independent expenditure committees are funding Adios Arpaio: Promise Arizona in Action PAC and Campaign for Arizona's Future PAC, which together have amassed more than $1 million in contributions to date, the bulk of it from the AFL-CIO and the labor union UNITE HERE.
Ovide said she's been in Arizona for a few years now, and has noticed something many others, including myself, have observed about Arizona. That is, what passes for normal here would horrify folks in other parts of the country.
"What is going on in Arizona is incomprehensible to people outside of Arizona," she observed. "When I describe even a tiny sliver of the antics of our sheriff to people on the East Coast, they can't believe it."
Fortunately, there's a tsunami of change coming to Sand Land, and it's headed right for Sheriff Joe.
I hope the next step for Adios Arpaio will be to educate voters, as Citizens for a Better Arizona is doing, about Republican-turned-Independent Mike Stauffer and why a vote for Stauffer is a vote for Arpaio.
Something tells me getting the message across to Latinos that Mike Stauffer is a losing proposition won't be that difficult. Unlike the kooks on the far-left, Latinos need Arpaio exiled from power. For them, this is not a parlor game.
UPDATE 9/25/12: Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborn informs me that as of September 18, her office had received 21,447 voter registration forms from the groups comprising Adios Arpaio. The slight discrepancy may be due to the fact that Adios Arpaio's numbers included a couple more days in the total.
