IN NOVEMBER, WILL YOU NEED TO STAND IN LINE FOR HOURS TO VOTE?

….The lines to vote in Arizona’s latest primary, They went for blocks, and sometimes for hours.

 

Long-lines are exactly what the Republican politicians are hoping to see at the November polls.

 

What do you think of a democratic community that reduced the number of voting locations to where there was one site for every 21,000 voters.  All that Elizabeth Bartholomew, the communications manager for Arizona’s Maricopa County’s Recorder had to say was “Well, it saves a lot of money!” 

 

That may be very true, but it doesn’t take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure that having only 60 voting locations for 1.25 million registered voters, by simple division that shows it would be one site for 21,000 voters.  In 2008, in the same county, there were 400 polling places, that’s one for every 5000 voters.

 

I find it interesting that this is the only county in Arizona that took this drastic approach, and it’s the same county that their county laws are enforced by the famous "Sheriff Joe" Arpaio.  He is the only American Sheriff that has endorsed Donald Trump. 

 

Their very lame excuse for this major reduction in polls was that for the Arizona primary, fewer polls were required because only those registered with the Democratic, Green or Republican parties were eligible to vote.  But in Maricopa County, (Arizona’s largest county) that still pencils out to 1.25 million eligible voters, compared with 2 million who are registered for the General Election.

 

In Pima County, there were still 130 sites for one-quarter as many eligible voters as in Maricopa County.  Why Maricopa thought that they could go from one site for 5000 voters, to one for 21,000 voters is beyond belief.



…A typical polling station in Maricopa County, Arizona.

 

At one of the Maricopa Church Polling Stations, a poll worker in late afternoon told a line of voters who had been waiting nearly three hours that the site had run out of ballots.

 

"I wouldn't say that too loudly," cautioned one voter.

 

About 15 minutes later, a very small box of ballots arrived.  Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne said she was told the location had run low on ballots, but was not aware of the supply being exhausted.  (That station actually ran out of ballots twice.)

 

By mid-afternoon, the Democratic and Republican parties had to send out advisories to the polls, reminding them they could still vote as long as they were in line by 7 PM. The Bernie Sanders' campaign made sure to urge their supporters to get the names of any poll worker who would tell them they had to leave the line.

 

When polls finally and officially closed, the poll workers marched to the end of the waiting lines to notify which was the last voter that would be allowed to vote.

 

In downtown Phoenix, a poll worker began enforcing the closure at about 7:02 p.m.  A minute later, he turned away a man who tried to get in line.

 

“So you plan to violate my right to vote?" the voter said to the worker.  "At this point, yes, the line ends with me."  The man then left very angry.

 

As with many of the lines in the high population areas of Phoenix, the lines spanned with more than 700 people and many were longer than 3-4 blocks.  But as one very tired female voters stated, "I'm here to exercise my right to vote," she told the reporter, and that was at about half an hour before midnight.

 

Ms. Sandi Steele had the difficult job of line-closing duty at the Phoenix Maryvale Church site, and she politely turned away the late arrivals. But at closing time, the line still snaked out of the church, turned north on the street, then east on another road.  At the time, Ms. Steele said she had no estimate on how long it would take to get all those voters to a ballot.  The voting went well after 12:00 midnight.

 

This is exactly what the GOP politicians that are running so many of our local and state governments want to see.  This is what we get when we have a conservative US Supreme Court that nullifies the Voting Rights Act and gives us the Citizens-United decision that has put the wealthy elite in charge of our country.  A court that also allows cutting polling places, voting days, voting hours and locating the polls in difficult to access locations.  (One polling location had only a few parking spaces and if you took a bus, the bus stop was three blocks from the polling station.  Wheel chair access was also difficult if not impossible.)

 

All hard working Americans need to take a very close look at who is running their local, state and national elections, and which political party is running their state.  These voters need to decide what kind of people they seriously want making those decisions that will affect them for decades.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016