Oh, wait, first question: Do you live in Arizona?
On Tuesday, Arizona’s Republican legislators
deliberately forced hundreds of thousands of voters to wait long hours at polling
stations, in an obvious strategy to deter people from voting.
A legal challenge already is under way.
About 60% of the population of Arizona lives and
votes in Maricopa County. In 2012, when 57% of President Obama’s re-election
votes in Arizona came from Maricopa County, about 1.2 million votes were cast
in the county at 200 polling places—that’s about 6,000 voters per location.
After the U. S. Supreme Court essentially trashed
the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, Arizona was freed to make changes in
election laws without federal oversight. (In the last 40 years, the feds
disallowed 22 of the state’s proposed election law revisions because of evidence
of discrimination against Hispanic and Native American voters).
With the federal oversight gone, Arizona legislators eliminated 170 of the polling places in Maricopa County “to save money.” So,
this week, 60 locations were open to serve voters—roughly, one polling place
for every 21,000 voters. Some voters waited in line for five hours to cast their ballots. In some predominantly Latino sectors of the county,
there were no convenient locations.
In
my town, there’s a polling station for every 2,500 voters. Usually I’m in and
out in less than 10 minutes.
I
want to believe I’d wait in line for five hours to vote, if I had to.
It’s
an outrage that the Republicans in Arizona tried to prevent their fellow
Arizonans from voting.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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