Inside Track Ep. 69 - Frank Antenori

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:01)

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SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Ed Wilkinson (0:20)

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SPEAKER_1 (0:21)

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Ed Wilkinson (0:32)

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SPEAKER_4 (1:02)

I'm proud to welcome my good friends at Tucson Iron and Metal Retail to Inside Track as an advertiser. Jamie Kipper and her staff are conservation experts.

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SPEAKER_2 (1:28)

You are listening to Live The Dream Media, exclusively on the Live The Dream Media Streamverse Network.

SPEAKER_5 (1:40)

Welcome to Inside Track with Bruce Ash and Ed Wilkinson on the Live The Dream Media Network.

Frank Antenori (1:49)

Hey, good morning. Frank Antenori here. Obviously, Bruce isn't here today. Bruce is enjoying a well-deserved vacation, and Ed is doing rotary, but he will be joining us at the bottom of the hour for the remaining half of the show. But for the first half of the show, it's all me. So I start out this morning. I'd like to thank Bruce and Ed for asking me to fill in for him today. It's a pleasure and an honor. Those guys have always been good friends and they do a remarkable service for everybody by keeping you informed. So I'd like to take this chance to talk to my fellow Republicans. If you don't know me, my name is Frank Antenori. I'm currently a county supervisor in Cochise County. I used to be an Arizona state senator and House or Senate Majority Whip in the Arizona Senate. I used to live in Pima County about 12, 13 years ago and moved out to Cochise County.

But there's been an interesting phenomenon going on in this election cycle that really has me perplexed, and I'd like to approach that, and that is voter turnout.

And it's an astonishing statistic. It's an irritating statistic, but nonetheless astonishing.

Years ago, the voters through the legislature decided to do this mail-in ballot thing. I don't know where you are. Some people support or like mail-in ballots. Some people aren't big fans of it. It's been a logistical nightmare, I could tell you, on the county elections departments, and it takes forever for us to count the votes because of mail-in ballots. That's a whole other story another day for another debate. But what astonishes me is it was done to encourage people to vote, and it was supposed to improve voter turnout, and it was supposed to be this remarkable thing to make it so easy that we were going to have voter turnouts in the high percentages, 80, 90% voter turnout. I remember the pitch. Oh, we're going to have, all right, now voter turnout's only like 65%.

Now, if we do mail-in ballots, it'll be 80, 90% never happened. Right now, roughly about 75, 80%, depending on which county you're in, of the voters in each county are signed up to receive a mail-in ballot. But we just went through a primary election, and what was really astonishing, Maricopa County had recorded the lowest voter turnout in their history ever, this past election cycle, this primary election cycle, it was 26%.

That's both parties. That's everybody. 26% voter turnout. If you look at Cochise County, and we're a pretty red county, only 56% of registered Republicans showed up to vote in Cochise County. In Pima County, it was significantly less. It was only 41% of registered Republicans showed up to vote. And to me, that is an unbelievably abysmal and anemic number.

We just went through the 25th anniversary of 9-11, where radical Islamic terrorists attacked our country, killed roughly 3,000 of our fellow American citizens, and then subsequently, in the war afterwards, thousands of American service members died, 26 of which were close friends of mine that I served with. A couple of them literally died at my feet. And it irritates me, after spending 21 years in the Army and almost 4 years in combat, defending this country and defending your right to vote, that 50% of you, at least in Cochise County, didn't bother to fill out your mail-in ballot or show up at the polls to vote, and 60% of you in Pima County didn't show up to vote. And I don't even know what the number is in Maricopa County. It was probably even worse in Maricopa. And I'm like astonished. Why is that? We have a general election coming up now, probably in Arizona at least, it is going to be a pivotal election.