How Badly Did Voter Suppression in Maricopa County Hurt Bernie in Arizona? [View all]

[Time for change]

I noted yesterday that in this Tuesday’s Arizona Democratic primary, Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, reduced the number of polling places open compared to 2012 from over 200 to 60, and that consequently, people spent entire work days waiting in line to vote, as voting lines stretched for over half a mile. Undoubtedly, many of them had to leave before voting, in order to avoid missing work, which I’m sure many of them could ill afford. The County recorder justified this blatant incident of voter suppression by claiming that “turnout is traditionally low” in Maricopa County.

But I did not make an effort in that post to estimate how much the vote was actually suppressed in Maricopa County and how badly that might have hurt Bernie’s chances in Arizona. The Maricopa County website statistics on Tuesday’s primary sheds some very interesting light on those questions.

That website shows that Clinton won the early voting part of the election in Maricopa County 118,832 to 71,019, over Sanders, a margin of 66.1% to 33.9%. The website also gives the total vote count, which also shows Clinton winning the total vote in Maricopa County, but by a little less. What it doesn’t do is specifically show us the statistics for Election Day voting. No problem. Those can be obtained by merely subtracting the early voting statistics from the total voting statistics.

The Election Day voting, which Bernie won by 19,883 to 12,802, shows us two very significant things. First, that Bernie won the voting on Election Day over Clinton by 60.8% to 39.2% in Maricopa County, quite a difference from the early voting margins. And second, it shows us that Election Day voting in Maricopa County accounted for only 14.7% of the total vote. I find that astounding! I have never heard of a presidential or any other election, where Election Day voting accounted for so low a percent of the total vote. This strongly suggests, in my opinion, that the effects of the voter suppression in Maricopa County were huge. Could it be that only 14.7% of voters who voted intended to vote on Election Day? There are three facts that strongly suggest otherwise. One is the 70% reduction in polling places, resulting in half mile lines that resulted in many people having to stand in line for several hours to vote. Another is the mis-categorization of Democratic voters as independent voters, who were therefore not allowed to vote. And the other is that, if one analyzes the data from the Arizona website, along with information on the overall Arizona data on early voting, one can calculate that Election Day voting in the Democratic primary in the rest of Arizona averaged 59.1% rather than 14.7%.

If one makes the reasonable assumption that in the absence of voter suppression, the Election Day voting percentage in Maricopa County would have been similar to that in the rest of Arizona, that would mean that more than 240 thousand additional voters would have voted on Election Day in the Democratic primary in Maricopa County. And assuming that Bernie’s margin of winning those extra votes over Clinton on Election Day was similar to the Election Day votes that were counted in Maricopa County, that would have meant that Bernie would have lost Arizona by about 2%, rather than by the almost 20% that he actually lost by in the official count. Also, keep in mind that these calculations are somewhat conservative, because they make no assumptions that the voter suppression in Maricopa County was targeted to Sanders areas. But why would anyone bother with voter suppression if it wasn’t targeted for or against a specific candidate? If the voter suppression was targeted to any extent to Sanders strongholds, that means that he probably would have won Arizona in the absence of any voter suppression.