A civil rights group is suing the Arizona Secretary of State and Maricopa County officials for mismanaging the recent Presidential Preference Election.
Monica Cooper, one of the plaintiffs, is disabled and spent two hours at her polling place, but had to leave without voting because her ride showed up.
Indeed, thousands of Maricopa County voters waited in line for as much as five hours in some places, mainly due to the dramatic reduction in polling locations.
That forms the basis of the lawsuit, filed by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which argues the long wait times violated Arizonans constitutional rights to fair elections and state statutes on how officials conduct elections.
“It’s a denial of our equal protection rights to force some people to stand in very very long lines in order to vote,” Shane Ham said, an attorney at Osborn Maldeon, one the firms litigating the case.
“It essentially takes away their right to vote. If you don’t have the health and strength and time to stand in line for five hours, it’s as if you aren’t allowed to vote at all," Ham said.
The lawsuit demands election officials develop a plan to reduce wait times and for court oversight of that until 2020.
"We ask that the board of supervisors create a polling place plan for each election so that the court could review and approve it," Ham said. "There would be an extra layer of oversight. It will not just be the country board of supervisors deciding what the election plan will be because we've seen that does not work."
Ham said the federal government was monitoring Maricopa County elections under the Voting Rights Act until a Supreme Court ruling in 2013.
The lawsuit highlights election errors that unfolded even after the Presidential Preference Election. Prior to the May 17 Special Election, the Spanish language version of ballots improperly labeled one of the propositions and more than 400,000 early voters did not receive their ballot guides far enough in advance.
The Arizona Secretary of State's Office did not yet have a comment on the suit.
