As for the road ahead, the Arizona Republic reported today on a Republican state senator who said “she spent more than five hours waiting to vote in the presidential preference election – casting her ballot at 12:20 a.m. Wednesday – plans to introduce legislation to assure Arizona voters won’t endure similar waits in the future”.
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While lines in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, were hours long, nearby Pima County had “130 sites, more than twice as many as Maricopa County, for one-quarter as many voters”, CNN reported.
Sharon MacVean, another voter in line at the church on Tuesday and a retired clergy worker, said she and her husband never received their mail-in ballots, though they are registered as early voters.
At a press conference in California on Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said his campaign had received an e-mail from a woman who had to wait five hours to vote.
Doug Ducey, a Republican, called the long lines in Maricopa County “unacceptable”, adding: “Our election officials must evaluate what went wrong and how they make sure it doesn’t happen again”.
However, according to multiple news sources, Arizona also experienced record election day turnout-which means Maricopa County’s 2008 figure of 113,807 election day votes should have been surpassed.
To say that Arizona’s primary this Tuesday was a crowded mess would be an understatement. Still others gave up and went home. “You are serving all the people of Maricopa County; that is our job”, said Purcell.
The long lines are particularly notable because they represent one of the first major mishaps in the first presidential election year in more than 50 years without Voting Rights Act protections. Many Maricopa county voters had to wait for hours to cast ballots.
“The voters for getting in line, maybe us for not having enough polling places”, she told Fox 10. But other factors that contributed to the fiasco which saw Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump breeze to victories in Arizona were the growing number of mail-in ballots the county recorder has seen in the last decade.
“At some stage in the game you sit back and say, ‘Could I do a better job than the people that are there?'” said Adrian Fontes, who filed paperwork to run against Purcell on Wednesday afternoon. In 2012, the Arizona county had 200 polling locations to meet the voting needs of its constituents.
The disaster that was Tuesday’s primary election can be summed up in two tweets.
Do you think what happened in Arizona was voter suppression?
Ducey suggested one way to fix the problem is by allowing independents who make up the largest voting bloc in the state to vote in presidential primaries. As long as that’s true, we’re going to continue to have what is essentially a third-world voting system nearly everywhere where Republicans are in charge.
In the Arizona primary election, Heavy reports, provisional ballots aren’t counted unless the voters are registered with the Republican, Democratic, Independent or Green parties.
“Every vote counts. Each vote matters”, he said.
The change was billed as a cost-saving measure, but it appears to have disproportionately affected minority voters, Stanton, a Democrat, said.
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If this doesn’t make you furious, you aren’t paying attention.
