It didn’t take long for the nation to hear about Arizona’s latest dump on people’s rights, the disgrace called the state primary: never-ending lines, lost ballots, altered records, uncertain outcomes—a fiasco all around mired in fraud.
While Maricopa County elections head Helen Purcell and her board of supervisors deserve, and accepted, the blame, the bozos at the legislature share in the guilt, since they took an axe to Purcell’s elections budget, cutting $2.4 million. She said reducing the number of polling places from 200 in 2012 to 60 this year, which was the principal cause of the elections nightmare, saved about $1 million (in 2008 the county had 400 locations). By comparison, Pima County, where Tucson is, had 130 polling sites this year, more than twice as many as Maricopa County, yet Pima has only one-fourth the population.
It’s not only the number of polling places that’s worrisome, however, but where they were eliminated. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton pointed out the inconsistencies in his letter to the Department of Justice requesting an investigation:
"For example, in Phoenix, a majority-minority city, County officials allocated one polling location for every 108,000 residents," he wrote. "The ratios 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 13,000 residents; in Fountain Hills, one for 22,500 residents; and in Peoria, one for every 54,000 residents."
So, in swanky Fountain Hills, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his mostly white Republican neighbors live, they had a polling booth for every 22,500 people. Where I live in downtown Phoenix, which is a Democratic, progressive bubble, there were almost five times as many of us trying to vote at each location. The DOJ investigation Mayor Stanton requested is underway.
At the same time, a lawsuit filed this week claims 150,000 people had their rights violated as a result of Maricopa County’s elections mismanagement. The lawsuit’s author, John Brakey, admits in a New Times article, that his number is an estimate, but he and Jim Simpson, a computer systems analyst, explain it with spreadsheets and fancy math:
Maricopa had a 50.22 percent voter turnout rate in 2008, and had the county’s 2016 voter turnout matched the general increase of other counties, the turnout should have been 62.5 percent (or approximately 150,000 more people).
It’s not a precise science to be sure, Brakey acknowledges, but given that the “probability of the 12.4 percent difference between Maricopa’s projected voter turnout and the official 50.2 percent turnout is approximately 1 in 6 trillion,” Brakey thinks this all merits a closer look.
Brakey and Simpson also allege that, because so many voters’ records were changed, mangled or lost, somebody may have hacked into the central database, which puts the entire primary outcome in jeopardy.
“We have strong reason to suspect something went wrong with the voter-registration data … and there are easy ways to determine via proper discovery [without the risk of further compromise] whether or not this class of attack actually occurred.”
All hell broke loose when Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell appeared before a packed public hearing two weeks ago. She says she will not resign, as many demanded, and a revote is not in the works, as many others requested. But the DOJ investigation and lawsuit may change that, while the secretary of state continues a “listening tour” to hear voter complaints. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The DNC and the Arizona Democratic Party just filed their own lawsuit:
In an email, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote, "We all watched in sadness and frustration as Arizona voters waited in lines up to five hours long to cast a ballot in the March primary. The Republican election officials who decided to reduce polling locations by 70 percent in order to cut costs later admitted they never considered the impact these actions would have on Black, Hispanic or Native American communities.
"We know that actions like this -- disregarding and disenfranchising thousands of voters -- were easier because the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.”