My apologies for the mega-multi-quote post.
Her interview on Chris Hayes tonight was interesting too. She has put all the blame on herself now but the damage is done. I can't believe she blamed the county voters for showing up to vote.
She might have been trying to be a little glib about it and realized how horrible it sounded. She was already backtracking in the original interview. Still, as a public official in charge of elections, she has to know that blaming voters for her failings is a thought she needs to keep inside her head.
...the early votes, which are supposedly "more conservative"...
Just anecdotally from Iowa, the Ds almost always beat the shit out of the Rs in absentee and early voting. 2014 was the only time in my memory that it was even close.
...in recent days I've heard people claim early voting is fraud and disenfranchising people.
Interesting. Early voting with satellite polling locations is expensive, have less oversight than "normal" polling locations, and are gamed by the parties to have the election officials open locations where they think they'll have an advantage. Absentee/mail-in ballots are actual targets of fraud (unlike the GOP's scaremongering of in-person vote fraud.) However, it seems to be a pretty far stretch to call them "fraud and disenfranchising."
That said, there was one good aspect of the election that she mentioned in her interview, that voters could vote at any polling location. That would be a great advancement for voting access if implemented well.
I'm not sure that's quite as good as it sounds; in the UK we're assigned a polling station but that polling station has a list of everyone assigned to it - so we don't require any physical ID, we just give our name and they check it off a list.
Although I've argued against technology in the ballot, the voter roll is a great place to implement technology (assuming there's a backup in case of failure.) All you need to check a voter in is a list of eligible voters and a method of handling day-of updates (if allowed.) That's a perfect job for a computer, a dial-up internet connection should be able to handle the bandwidth required for a text-only database record update. Hell, throw a time-stamp in there and have a camera recording the polling location and you have protection against in-person voter fraud (even though that's virtually non-existent) to throw the GOP a bone.
It depends on how sensibly polling stations are allocated, I guess. The way they're describing it makes it sound like it's few enough that assigning them still isn't going to be helpful.
(Also, the UK has something like 50,000 polling stations for a country that's actually smaller than Arizona. 60 for an entire county is... not great. How many are there across all Arizona?)
There are 15 counties in Arizona, and Maricopa is most populous by far - almost 4 times as big as the next largest. With the moronic "no more than half of the normal polling locations" law, I wouldn't be surprised if there were less than 1,000 locations statewide. I'm sure the law was passed under the guise of saving money or as a prelude to moving to an all-mail ballot, but it sure as hell becomes disenfranchising, especially when election officials are so ill-prepared for an election that has decent turnout.
