Arizona voting rights groups are training residents in Phoenix and Tucson to become constitutional observers on Election Day.
Around 80 people filed into a hotel in Tucson Saturday for an event organized by advocacy group LUCHA. Karime Rodriguez, a training facilitator with the group, says volunteers are briefed on what voting access should look like and how to report Election Day issues.
“So they will observe the polling environments — what do they see is going well? What do they see needs to be updated to ensure accessibility for everyone?” she said.
Rodriguez says this year, the possibility of ICE agents being near or at polling sites is causing fear — especially for new citizens.
“The threat of potentially having ICE scares them. And even though they are citizens now, they’re saying, ‘you know, because of the color of my skin, I might be targeted,’” she said.
The Tucson event came just after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant in Houston, and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant in Maine, were killed within a week of each other by immigration officers during traffic stops. Their deaths are the latest fatal shootings by Department of Homeland Security personnel this year, and the agency has since said neither man was the intended target of enforcement.
Photos of Salgado Araujo and other people killed in DHS shootings sat on a table with candles at Saturday’s event.
A map put together by LUCHA shows polling sites in Maricopa and Pima counties and sites where heavier ICE enforcement has been seen. During Saturday’s event, Rodriguez led participants through a series of hypothetical Election Day scenarios, like ICE being near polling places, and asked them to work out a plan of action for reporting issues.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat the possibility of enforcement being heavier on Election Day, or even leading up to Election Day, because the point is fear,” Rodriguez said. “So that people are scared to leave their homes, scared to be in communities, so that they are discouraged from voting.”
A failed bill crafted by Arizona’s GOP lawmakers would have required ICE agents to be at polling sites across the state. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice says it wants to send election monitors to swing states, including Arizona.
Tucson resident Frank Thompson, a Vietnam veteran who took part in the training Saturday, said he wants to encourage people who may be apprehensive to still vote.
“I’m here to try to get people to understand the importance of their voice to vote, if they don’t exercise that voice, they are going to lose it,” he said.
LUCHA says volunteers will be placed at polling places during this week’s primary and additional observer training events will happen ahead of midterm elections later this year.
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