Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won the Arizona Presidential Preference Election Tuesday. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).
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Why would any voter continue to stand in line when they’ve just been told that no matter how they vote, the victor has already been determined?
The election cost the state just under $10 million. Across the county, the ratio was one polling location per every 21,000 voters, the Republic reported. “I was deprived of my vote by the people who put this together”. At multiple polling sites, voters waited in massive lines that topped more than five hours. Some left, some stayed and ordered pizza, others were still in line way after polls closed at 7 p.m. “In my neighboring district, LD 30, there are no polling places”. He was sent home. “So I think that’s kind of stirred everybody up, energized them”. In Phoenix, where the majority of residents are Hispanic, black, or another minority, each polling place served 108,000 residents. The rations were far more favorable in predominantly Anglo communities: “In Cave Creek/Carefree, there was one polling location for 8,500 residents; in Paradise Valley, one for every 13,000 residents; in Fountain Hills, one for 22,500 residents; and in Peoria, one for every 54,000 residents”, Stanton wrote.
“Since we’re anticipating bigger groups at the polling places, that means more people”, Purcell said.
But the distribution of polling places was also uneven, with more precincts placed in white neighborhoods than ones where more minority voters live.
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News organizations called the winners of the races soon after the county released the early vote totals, upsetting some voters who were still stranded in line.
Arizona Gov. Doug Duce, a Republican, said Tuesday’s situation was “unacceptable”.
“They do it to us”, Jimenez said. Those battles are being waged again after people waited in line for hours to vote in some places. This is one of the issues that has to be ironed-out right away, so that these votes, if they are applicable, can be counted.
Gubernatorial press aide Daniel Scarpinato said his boss opposes the legislation. “The fact that more people want to participate is a good thing”. Grijalva’s statement: Arizona’s voting irregularities in the presidential primary were prominent and on display for the whole country to see yesterday. But local election officials also resent voters who get in the way of others, when they show up to cast ballots but are ineligible and weren’t smart enough to vote early or vote by mail.
The impacts of undoing the Voting Rights Act have been dramatically revealed in Arizona, and the result is disenfranchisement plain and clear.
Ultimately, the federal government needs to restore the Voting Rights Act. An editorial in the Arizona Republic called the lines “shameful”. “And what happened in Arizona is a disgrace”.
“Our election officials must evaluate what went wrong”.
“It’s not fair”, Kaplan said while waiting in line Tuesday.
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At this point, who’s not investigating Arizona’s polling problems?!
