UNITE HERE sends us this report from Arizona. 

After more than a week of protests that brought national attention to what Rachel Maddow called “Arizona’s Broken Electoral System,” Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett told the Associated Press over the weekend that he will seek an overhaul of Arizona’s ballot-counting process.

Bennett’s announcement comes just days after his initial insistence that, while not perfect, Arizona’s counting this year was customary and that protests were unnecessary.

Sarah Burris of UNITE HERE sends us this update from Arizona. Burris works in online media. 

I've been on the ground this week in Arizona to help a campaign UNITE HERE invested in this year called Adios Arpaio. Adios Arpaio was a massive voter-registration campaign, aimed at voting out the notoriously anti-immigrant Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, that was led by 2,000 high school students, many of them the children of immigrants. We registered 35,000 new voters, and 70% of them are Latino. I've spent some time here before and many, many weeks since helping with everything I could. 

More than 100 high school students and members of UNITE HERE, Promise Arizona in Action and Adios Arpaio are rallying outside the Maricopa County Recorder's Office to demand the more than 450,000 provisional ballots be counted. 

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at Democratic Diva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Newly elected Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema’s Facebook feed is full of comments like this one:

I can hardly believe that you are actually going to be my Congresswoman. That's amazing. I am finally going to feel represented, and I know you'll do a good job. Thank you!

The closely watched and very heated congressional race finally came to a close Monday night when news outlets called the 9th Congressional District for Democratic candidate Sinema. As of this writing, she has a comfortable lead of more than 6,000 votes over Republican challenger and former Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker. Parker conceded yesterday.

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at Democratic Diva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Protesters are chanting “Count our votes! Count our votes!” in a vigil outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office they've been holding since Wednesday. At issue are an estimated 600,000 outstanding ballots statewide, representing about a third of the 1.8 million votes cast in Arizona on Tuesday night. The majority of the uncounted votes are in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa. About a third of these ballots are provisional ones, which are issued when there is a discrepancy in the voter’s polling place or registration information. Promise Arizona, the Latino civic engagement group that organized the vigil in Phoenix, is demanding a transparent count of every vote and an explanation for why so many votes were provisional. Several precincts throughout the county reportedly ran out of provisional ballots, an occurrence unheard of before this election.

Sign the petition: Every Vote Needs to be Counted in Arizona. 

Immigration was a major issue for Latino voters when they cast ballots to choose the next president of the United States. America’s Voice Education Fund (AVEF), an organization that advocates for aspiring citizens, said in a statement that the unprecedented Latino turnout levels and historic levels of support for Democratic candidates helped President Obama win re-election and kept the Senate a Democratic majority. 

AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer sends us this. 

As we head into the final stretch of the election season, these are six overarching points to keep in mind. 

1. Working-class rejection of Bush-Romney-Ryan economics is the defining issue of this year.

A year ago, all the talk was that President Obama could never win with high unemployment. And even more to the point, the early conventional wisdom went further, writing off working-class voters, asserting that the only path available to Obama was upscale voters in states like North Carolina. Yet what we see is that middle-class families are not voting automatically on the basis of the current economic statistics. They are comparing alternative approaches—and rejecting the reverse Robin Hood, union-busting, extreme economic positions of the right.