UPDATED: Unbelievable! The Maricopa County Elections Department has just admitted that they once again gave Latino voters the wrong date for next month’s election.
This time, it’s bookmarks distributed by the elections department that incorrectly lists the general election date in Spanish as November 8, while the correct date (November 6) is listed in English on the flip side.
A spokesman says that the bookmarks were distributed at the three election counters around Maricopa County and that the department has no way of knowing exactly how many people received the bookmarks.
Arizona’s Maricopa County—home to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio—made an egregious and suspicious mistake this week voter registration cards that gave the wrong date in Spanish.
The county says it mailed out nearly 2 million of these voter registration cards, and some contained a mistake where election dates in English read “November 6” but election dates in Spanish read “8 de Noviembre.” The county claims that only 50 of these erroneous cards were mailed out.
The mistake is raising a lot of eyebrows in an election year where minorities already feel like there are attempts to suppress their vote, thanks to voter ID laws popping up around the nation (in Virginia, a contractor for the state Republican Party has been arrested for allegedly discarding voter registration forms). Maricopa County says that new cards have been updated so that they show the correct dates in both English and Spanish. But as Petra Falcon, the executive director of Promise Arizona in Action, told CNN, “It’s a mistake that should not have happened. To know that there’s information out there that’s wrong, it’s going to take a lot of work to make sure that people know the correct date.”
