Cynthia Perez, a lawyer, stopped by a polling site on her way to work. She found a line so long she could not see the end of it. Days later, angry and baffled [Arizona] voters are still trying to make sense of how democracy is working in Maricopa County, the state's most populous, where officials cut the number of polling places by 70 percent to save money - to 60 from 200 in the last presidential election. That translated to a single polling place for every 108,000 residents in Phoenix, a majority-minority city that had exceptional turnout in Tuesday's Democratic and Republican primaries. Many observers saw Arizona as ... pointing toward potential problems nationally. The presidential election will be the first since the Supreme Court dismantled a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, freeing nine states, including Arizona and parts of seven others, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. Arizona has a long history of discrimination against minorities, preventing American Indians from voting for much of its history because they were considered "wards of the nation," imposing English literacy tests on prospective voters and printing English-only election materials even as the state's Spanish-speaking population grew. On Tuesday, calls poured into the office of Arizona's attorney general ... well into the night, as people heard poll workers tell them to go home, "the election has already been decided," said a spokesman.
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