Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, the person in charge of the total disaster that was voting in Phoenix in the primary election on March 22, has taken the blame for what she calls "a giant mistake," cutting polling locations by 70 percent from 2012.
Purcell, a Republican, said she looked at numbers from the last contested presidential primary in 2008 and assumed many people would mail in ballots. She also blamed the legislature for not giving counties like hers enough money to properly hold elections. […]
If the botched election happened in a vacuum, perhaps the long lines might not have become such an explosive political issue. But voting rights activists who were on the ground that day say there are too many parallels to past fudged elections in Arizona not to wonder whether there's something more sinister going on.
"We don't know if they were honest mistakes or not, but there's certainly a pattern of mistakes," said Shuya Ohno, director of the Right to Vote campaign at the nonpartisan civil rights organization Advancement Project.
The decision might not have been motivated by voter suppression, though since Maricopa county as a diverse population, that remains suspect. But there wouldn't have been a lot for Arizona Republicans to gain by shutting so many voters out of a primary election. There likely was a healthy dose of incompetence and poor judgement at play here. The goal in moving from 200 to 60 voting locations might have even been a laudable one, as larger "voting centers" are supposed to make voting easier—they're catch-all polling places where you can vote where it's geographically convenient for people. Done right, a voting center can expand the vote. Done the way Arizona did it, however, did not.
The fact remains that Arizona was one of the states that had to clear any changes in voting procedures through the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act. That was before the Supreme Court gutted the law in 2013. That's the history for Arizona, that's precisely why there have been calls for a federal investigation of the fiasco. Had it still been covered under the VRA, this reduction of polling places would have received strict scrutiny. Maybe a 70 percent reduction in polling locations would have been vetoed, and a more reasonable number settled on.
And maybe it's a good thing Arizona faced this in the primary. Because the intense scrutiny the state is now under will give voters of color there a better shot at exercising their right to vote in November.