If you’ve heard anything about the 2022 midterm elections in Arizona, it’s probably that, much like what happened in 2020, things didn’t exactly go as planned – at least not for the average American voter. And no, it’s not just Republicans saying that because they supposedly lost in some rather tight races.
In fact, according to a number of polls being taken in the state, Democrats make up a vast portion of those concerned about the integrity and viability of those elections. In particular, elections in Maricopa County have been called into question.
According to voter after voter and source after source, the number one problem was the incredibly long lines experienced in the county on Election Day.
According to the county, voting tabulators and ballot printers went down at 71 polling locations during the day. Kari Lake, Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, says that number was closer to 114 locations, or about 53 percent of the sites in the county.
This resulted in extremely long lines at polling station after polling station. Naturally, these long lines weren’t seen just at the sites where machines were down. But also as near to those as poll workers instructed those waiting in the long lines that they could go to other locations hoping to find shorter lines.
Of course, once arriving, they were only met with another long line.
And no, this wasn’t just at the end of the day. As numerous voters can attest, lines were long first thing in the morning when machines at several sites were already down. According to one, there was a two-hour wait at both midday and 6 pm.
As you can imagine, this was frustrating to voters and discouraging. Here we are, experiencing the first real election since the supposed fiasco of 2020 when Maricopa County experienced massive voting problems, and things are no better.
In fact, for some, the process of voting was worse. At least in 2020, people got to vote. Here in 2022, it was noted that hundreds, if not thousands, were so discouraged by the long lines that they simply gave up and turned away.
Mike Peterson, a poll worker in the area, told the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Monday that over 500 people were denied their right to vote at his location at the end of the voting on Election Day. He noted that about 675 people were in line to vote when his site officially closed at 7 pm. Now, they could have stayed in line and eventually gotten through. But thanks to the long lines and even longer time it took to get through them, few did.
“Of those 675, do you know how many came in? One hundred and fifty.”
As he continued, criticizing the board, “It means that you have personally disenfranchised voters. They have (come), they have seen and they have given up because they know what is going on.”
And this is at just one site. And just at the end of the day. How many more do you think gave up on the long lines throughout the day? I’d say hundreds more.
This means thousands of Arizona voters, who wanted to vote, didn’t get to.
Numerous sources allege that poll workers weren’t properly trained added to the mess.
Now, how do you think this might have impacted election results?
According to election data, the senatorial race between Democrat and supposed winner Mark Kelly and Republican Blake Masters was a rather close one, with Kelly winning by only about 125,000 votes. The race for the Governor’s mansion was even closer, with Democrat Katie Hobbs supposedly beating GOP member Kari Lake by a mere 17,000 votes.
As Rasmussen lead pollster Mark Mitchell pointed out, even Democrats have a problem with this.
According to a Rasmussen Report survey, 72 percent of US voters in the state, including 69 percent of Democrats, believe that possibly hundreds of thousands of voters were denied their “sacred right to vote.”
Furthermore, it’s important to note here that data from the same Election Day reports say that Republican voters outnumbered Democrat ones three to one at the polls.
And yet, the Democrats won…Hmmm.
