“Angry Arizona Voters Demand: Why Such Long Lines at Polling Sites?”

Fernanda Santos reports for the NYT:

All day, lines meandered along church courtyards, zigzagged along school parking lots and snaked around shadeless blocks as tens of thousands of voters waited to cast their ballots, including many independents who did not know that only those registered to a party could participate in the state’s closed presidential primaries.

But beyond the electoral breakdown here, many observers saw Arizona as a flashing neon sign pointing toward potential problems nationally at a time that 16 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The presidential election will be the first since the Supreme Court dismantled a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, freeing nine states, including Arizona and parts of seven others, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.

Wisconsin, which holds its primary elections April 5, is one of nine states with strict photo ID requirements. Thirty-three states have some form of voter ID. Kansas has enacted proof-of-citizenship requirements for all voter registration, a move that has disproportionately affected young voters and those attempting to register for the first time. North Carolina allows a registered voter to challenge the identity and eligibility of any voter casting a ballot in the same county.

My quote to the Times, echoing my earlier post that the cause of the long lines yesterday in Maricopa County appears to be more incompetence than malfeasance (and only possible because John Roberts & Co. killed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act), led to this piece of fan mail:

Subject: You are full of shit about AZ – it’s intentional
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 21:31:25 -0500
From: xxxx
To: [email protected]
Why did you lie to the Times? If you don't think it's intentional you have the intuitiveness of a 3 month old. 
Sent from my iPhone
Share this: