The lines were so long at some voting sites during Arizona's primary Tuesday that people started ordering pizza while they waited. Budget cuts have forced Arizona to close two-thirds of its voting sites. The race in Arizona was called for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton while hundreds of people were still in line, waiting to vote. Here's what's significant about that.
Arizona had a long history of voter suppression based on race, and so was one of the nine states previously protected by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the very act that the Supreme Court decided to gut in 2013. You might remember Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that the only reason the VRA passed the Senate unanimously for so many decades when it was up for reauthorization was because it had such a nice innocuous title, and that the law was a “racial entitlement.”
Arizona voters have discovered, just as New Hampshire primary voters did, that voter suppression efforts affect everybody—white people, too—when states are allowed to make it so much harder to exercise the franchise.