Election Fraud, fake candidates by the Tea Party and Republicans disenfranchise Voters and Destroys Confidence in Elections.

Big surprise: Arizona's most powerful Republican ran a phony opposition party candidate to split and dilute a fellow Republicans vote count and chances.

These are the guy who sold you “voter fraud,” a nonexistent scare tactic conservatives worry would take away their vote.  Elections are a joke, a game of deceit for Republican to play and unfairly win at.

NYT: 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 challenged the State Senate president, Russell Pearce, disappeared from the political scene last week just as quickly as she had appeared. Ms. Cortes’s candidacy, 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.

Greg Western, a Pearce ally who is the chairman of the East Valley Tea Party, was a central figure in the scheme and became Ms. Cortes’s campaign adviser. Ms. Cortes avoided the news media for weeks, and the few interviews she did give showed her to be shaky on the issues. Her candidacy began falling apart after another candidate, Jerry Lewis, who like Mr. Pearce is a Republican, began his own campaign. Allies of Mr. Lewis’s went to court to challenge Ms. Cortes’s election bid as a sham.

The judge, Edward O. Burke of Superior Court of Maricopa County (said) “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.

The Republican Party, along with its ally in scams, the corruptible tea party, are a wonderful pair in undermining democracy. It didn’t take long for the tea party to go completely off the tracks.