I lived for several years in Pima County, Arizona....the Tucson region, and would occasionally go to the Phoenix region (Maricopa County). So my five observations.....since they've been in the election news so much.
1. Maricopa County is about the size of the northern third of the state of Alabama. Yeah, it's huge. Six of the ten major cities in the state....reside in Maricopa.
2. Population? 4.5-million. That's about sixty-percent of the state of Arizona.
3. Ethnic breakup of the county? 30-percent are Latino. 6-percent black. The rest....mostly white.
4. Jobs? Mostly service sector or the US government. There's just not that much in terms of industry.
5. There are 223 voting 'centers' in the county. So when they got to Tuesday and voting started up.....at roughly a quarter of these (60), all kinds of problems occurred.
If you had just five or six.....no one would say much and just fix the broken mess. But to have almost a quarter screwed up? It has to be either total incompetence or by design.
Telling people to go to another site? If you lived/worked in Mobile (SE corner of the county).....you'd have to drive to Gila Bend (a good 30 minute drive....one-way). If you were voting in Wintersberg, it'd be a good 15-minute drive to the next station, and hoping it wasn't screwed-up.
My view? There's going to be lawyers involved and lawsuits by the end of this mess....with massive cases going to the State Supreme court. Damages? If you were forced to drive eighty miles round-trip.....I think the time and gas involved....ought to be on the state's pay-up list.
But all of this begs the question....are they really that stupid or incompetent at managing a one-day election every two years? Do we need to activate the state National Guard to run things because county officials can't do the job?
