Ariz. primary fuels debate about voter access
PHOENIX — Arizona's presidential primary debacle outraged Maricopa County voters and gave the state another national black eye.
But beyond the immediate embarrassment over the voters who waited in line for hours to cast a ballot, the incident fueled an ongoing debate about voter access and contributed to an unsettling sense that, instead of getting easier, it is getting harder and harder to participate on election day. What for previous generations was a celebration of democracy has devolved into drudgery that erodes confidence in the outcome.
Why, in a state where you can drive for decades without darkening the door of the Motor Vehicle Department, does exercising citizens' fundamental civic responsibility seem to be getting more difficult?
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The state does have a popular vote-by-mail program with a 30-day window for balloting that gets more use every year. But for those voting in person, or trying to, long lines, congested parking lots and confusion over who could vote fueled a belief that someone was trying to keep them from participating.
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And the primary reason for the problems: a quest to save a few bucks. To many, it seemed like the government had its priorities upside-down.
Kristy Tercero marveled at the long lines and her inability to get to the Tolleson City Hall polling place near her home.
She had a mail-in ballot that she wanted to drop off at the polling site. She erroneously believed she had to stand in line to deliver the ballot, unaware that vote-by-mail voters who miss the mail-in deadline can walk to the front of the line to drop it off.
“Even if I wanted to just drop it off, I couldn’t find a place to park,” she said. She went home without voting for her candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Don Scalera re-registered as a Democrat from an independent to cast a ballot for Sanders.
He’s well aware he can vote by mail, but he likes showing up in person to fulfill his civic duty. This year, exercising it was downright annoying, and he feels he was punished for wanting to vote in person. He waited four hours to cast his ballot and said people “were hurting and very tired.”
On the Republican side, there was good reason to hang on to your ballot. The field has been in flux. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida dropped out of the presidential race March 15, a day before the deadline to send a ballot in the mail.
“Call me old-fashioned, but I like the whole physical aspect of going there and filling out the ballot,” said Scalera, 63, of Phoenix. “To have deliberately — for whatever reason, budgetary or whatever — chop down the voting places, especially in a year where everyone is so polarized and motivated to vote is either incompetent or sinister.”
More state regulation, less federal oversight
Maricopa County's dramatic miscalculation on the number of polling sites was attributed to an attempt to save money. The number of county polling sites dropped from 400 in 2008, to 200 in 2012, to just 60 on Tuesday. That works out to just one site for every 21,000 Maricopa County voters.
The savings? An estimated $900,000 to $1 million.
"This particular example I think is a great illustration of how you can very narrowly try to resolve a problem that you perceive — like spending too much money — without thinking about what the ramifications will be on voters," said Kareem Crayton, a political scientist and visiting professor of law at Vanderbilt University, who is an expert on voting rights. "And, in particular, voters who have a history of being marginalized."
Lack of federal oversight could be part of the problem, he said. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court said Arizona and other states were no longer required to get U.S. Justice Department "pre-clearance" under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act before implementing election-related changes.
If pre-clearance had been in effect, Maricopa County’s plan to open only 60 polling sites would have been subject to federal review to ensure the changes would not impede minorities from voting. Pre-clearance could have hit the pause button on the county's plan.
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Today, there is still recourse if a plan is found to have violated voters' civil rights, but any such finding would come long after the election is decided.
Even if only "sheer negligence" is to blame, that federal backstop of scrutiny may have foreseen that the decision would burden some voters, Crayton said.
"You can't correct these problems after the fact," he said. "Even if it (a long wait to vote) is not outright denial, the delay on one level can be denial because people just decide to give up and go home."
Tim Hill, a Republican from Glendale, said that's what happened to him.
His favorite candidate, celebrity billionaire and GOP front-runner Donald Trump, won anyway, but he’s frustrated he didn’t get to have his say on election day.
Hill said he and his wife were on the county’s early-voting list, but never received their ballots. On Tuesday, they drove to their polling location, near 90th and Northern avenues, but the lines wrapped around the building. Twice. Disabled, Hill is unable to stand for long periods, let alone in the heat. He gave up on voting.
“We waited for it and waited for it, and they didn’t come,” Hill said. “I don’t know if it’s a Republican thing or a Democrat thing, but it just doesn’t sit right.
“It kind of makes me mad — and it also makes me suspicious.”
Bruce Adelson worked in the Justice Department from 2000 through 2006. During his tenure as senior trial attorney in the voting section of the Civil Rights division, he dealt with many “pre-clearance” reviews of changes to voting procedures.
Now a consultant on federal compliance, Adelson said he has looked at Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton’s request that the Justice Department to review whether the county plan disadvantaged minority voters. Avondale City Councilman Lorenzo Sierraalso has asked the Justice Department to investigate the lack of polling sites in his city, the population of which is 50% Latino and 9% black.
Given the “high profile” of the polling-place issues, Adelson said he would expect a prompt initial review of Stanton’s complaint.
At the state Capitol, the divide on voting issues has split largely along partisan lines.
Saying they're worried about the possibility of voter fraud, Republicans, who control state government, in recent years have pushed bills changing the election process. This month, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed legislation outlawing the practice of ballot collection, or "harvesting" as its critics have dubbed it. It's now a felony to take somebody else's mail-in ballot to the polls unless they are a member of the same household.
Democrats said the new law amounts to voter suppression. They argue certain voters, often Latino or elderly, rely on others to deliver their early ballots to polls.
Secretary of State Michele Reagan, who on Monday touted the county's 60-poll plan, has since said she feels "awful" about the outcome. Reagan, a Republican, is planning a series of public hearings in the areas most affected by the long lines, and said the information she gathers will help shape future election procedures.
"She's concerned with decreasing voter confusion," Reagan spokesman Matt Roberts said. However, he and Reagan declined comment until a Monday news conference where Reagan will discuss her preliminary review of Tuesday's events.
'I feel like I was denied my right'
Independents who were under the mistaken impression that they could vote in Arizona's primary also contributed to the time delays, although likely not to the degree county officials initially claimed.
Poll workers did deal with scores of independent voters who showed up and asserted their right to vote — something that is guaranteed by federal law. But their provisional ballots will not count if elections officials verify they indeed are not registered with one of the three political parties that participated in Tuesday’s election.
Veteran poll worker Kenneth Buss blames it on widespread misunderstanding of what the election really was. “The biggest hang-up was too many times on the television, on the news, they kept referring to this as a primary, which it was not,” Buss said.
Technically, Arizona has a "presidential preference election," in which voters of the Democratic, Green and Republican parties express their “preference” for their party’s presidential nominee.
The distinction is lost on anyone who is not an election wonk. Because it essentially is a primary, national news outlets and the presidential campaigns themselves refer to it that way.
But calling it a “primary,” Buss and other poll workers said, reinforces the message that elections officials have been trying to drive home for years: that independents can vote in a primary election.
Despite local news coverage that made it clear independents had to re-register with one of the parties by Feb. 22 to vote, inevitably many voters didn't get the message.
“It is very confusing,” said Elizabeth Bartholomew, communications manager for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. "An independent voter can vote in every election except this one election every four years.”
Given the confusion and frustration, Ducey has suggested the state should open the presidential preference election up to all voters.
But other factions in Ducey's party are working to make it harder for independents to vote in regular primaries.
A.J. LaFaro, the former Maricopa County Republican Party chairman, has led efforts to ban independents from the state’s primary elections. He says independents’ influence on GOP primaries leads to moderate candidates beating more conservative contenders.
“We have a set of values that we subscribe to and independent voters, in my opinion, do not subscribe to that platform of values,” LaFaro said. “I’ll be very candid: I don’t think that independent voters should be able to adversely affect the outcome of our party’s nominees.”
Last year, members of the Arizona Republican Party, which is generally seen as more moderate than the county party, raised the idea of suing the state to prevent independents from casting votes in the primary.
The proposal was scuttled in part because of anticipated litigation costs, and differing views on the prospects of winning. But before, the state GOP assembled a committee to study what could be done to ensure candidates that appear on the ballot are representative of the views of the Republican Party.
The committee settled on moving the state to a caucus system, where precinct committeemen determine the candidates who appear on the ballot for certain elected positions, including U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, governor and other statewide and county positions. Independents would have been allowed to vote on the settled-upon contenders, said Chris Herring, a member of the state GOP’s executive committee.
The proposal was introduced at the state Legislature this session, but died.
“There isn’t a single option that everyone thinks is right,” Herring said. He said some in the party want to close the primary and others want to be inclusive and keep the system as it is.
“I don’t think we’ve made it more difficult to vote,” he said. “I think we’re definitely exploring options constantly to make it easier to vote. Whenever we protect the integrity of an election, it can be construed as making it more difficult to vote, and that’s not the case.”
Contributing: Rob O'Dell and Rebekah L. Sanders, The Arizona Republic. Follow Dan Nowicki, Mary Jo Pitzl and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez on Twitter: @dannowicki, @maryjpitzl and @yvonnewingett