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Arizona Committee To Discuss Potential Barriers To Voting

The Arizona Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public meeting Friday to talk about potential barriers to voting in the aftermath of a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. 

The bipartisan committee will hear testimony from policy makers, advocacy groups, and attorneys about access — access to polls, early voting, voter registration, even language. And in some ways it’ll be a test of Shelby County v Holder, in which the U-S Supreme Court ruled that a handful of states including Arizona no longer needed pre-clearance from the Justice Department to change its voting procedures.

"The committee is very interested to see if in its aftermath the different protected classes have been adversely impacted by that decision," said Lorena Van Assche, chair of the Arizona Advisory Committee.

Van Assche is talking about the 2016 Presidential Election. Arizona eliminated 212 polling locations after Shelby v. Holder. 

The public meeting will be livestreamed from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Friday.

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KJZZ senior field correspondent Kathy Ritchie has 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local media outlets — nearly a decade of it has been spent in public media.