A day after thousands of Maricopa County voters stood in line for hours, the county official in charge of the elections department denied that cost-cutting was to blame. But Wednesday she backtracked, saying she failed to anticipate the effect of intense voter interest on primary turnout.
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Arizona Governor Doug Ducey a Republican, said the long lines were unacceptable and called on election officials to evaluate what went wrong and what could be done to prevent a repeat.
The state Democratic party said it would investigate any voter complaints, but given top officials’ backing for Clinton, it doesn’t seem likely anything will come of that, especially anything that would reverse the results.
The amount of voter suppression Arizona voters experienced on Tuesday night may be unparalleled-the entire day of voting was a complete disaster, so much so that a class action election fraud lawsuit has been filed. “It is no coincidence many poor and predominantly Latino areas didn’t get a polling place”, wrote Arizona Republic columnist Elvia Diaz.
“Chairman, members of the board, we have tried at your direction, to keep the presidential preference as cheap as humans could do it”, said Karen Osborne, who is the elections director, as she addressed the board. “They could have voted early”.
For the 2012 primaries, Maricopa County accommodated 300,000 voters at 200 polling places. It was the first thing out of her mouth.
Three-fourths of the Democratic caucus sites in Utah ran out of ballots, sending workers to nearby stores to print more ballots or voters home to bring back reams of paper or even a home printer at one site.
Stanton says that raises question of whether all voters were treated equally. “But I think we have seen the hype in the last week to 10 days, of the national candidates coming here-which we haven’t seen in past years”.
The Arizona Democratic Party has asked voters who had trouble voting to complete an online form describing their challenges.
Arizona should give Maricopa County enough money to hold smooth elections. She then qualified that she didn’t want to “blame” the voters for the egregious offense of trying to vote in large numbers, but nevertheless went on to suggest that voters who were frustrated by long lines should have voted early.
In this March 21, 2016 photo, Maricopa County recorder Helen Purcell speaks at a news conference on Arizonas presidential primary election in Phoenix.
The Associated Press has declared Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton the winners of Arizona’s presidential preference election.
“I don’t think anybody warned us of anything”.
Polling places across the county featured scores of voters waiting in line for hours.
But he’ll be facing voters for the first time in a slimmed-down field of candidates that doesn’t include Florida Sen. On Wednesday, dozens of voters gathered outside the county elections office to call for Purcell’s resignation. But she said she waited with her son to vote until 11:30 p.m.at the Church of the Beatitudes at 555 West Glendale Avenue. “Looking at that and how many people we thought would go to the polls, there was obviously a mistake”.
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Since that decision, jurisdictions like Maricopa County have been free to make any voting changes they saw fit, without regard to how they might affect minority voters.
