It is difficult to respond to Gene Mikolajczyk’s attacks on me in last week’s letters section (His actions) because they are, like Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel, haphazard, poorly executed and unjustified. Mikolajczyk engages in name-calling, misrepresenting facts and ascribing a false and sinister motive to me.

Mikolajczyk falsely calls my record of passing needed, bipartisan election bills a diversion from his false and unsubstantiated belief that I am trying to suppress the votes of “uninformed voters” for sinister reasons, specifically fear.

Mikolajczyk falsely claims that I am a professional politician, ignoring the fact that for almost every year that I held political office (nine years on two town councils and 15 years in the Arizona legislature), I was employed full-time as either a police officer or college professor/program director. I never made a living from politics.

Mikolajczyk then falsely accuses me of trying to “remove control of one voter list from unelected bureaucrats, (sic) and to give control to elected politicians.” The bill he references would have switched the operation of the “motor voter” program that allows voters to register to vote at motor vehicle departments from the outside non-government contractor that currently operates the program to the election officials that Arizona voters elected to do that job, the Secretary of State and county recorders. That’s good policy!

So, Mr. Mikolajczyk got the facts on this bill totally wrong. It did not involve controlling any list and the elected officials he claims should not control election lists are actually the ones who currently control every election list in the state!

In my last reply to Mr. Mikolajczyk’s false attacks upon me, I jokingly wrote, “based upon the misinformation some are disseminating, maybe The Times should require literacy tests for its letter writers.” I’m no longer joking about that.