Arizona County Lists Wrong Date For Election Day In Spanish Translation Of Document
As Election Day approaches, reports of problems and errors complicating voters' ability to cast a ballot typically increase. The latest example?
Officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., mistakenly listed the general election date as Nov. 8, not Nov. 6, in the Spanish translation of an "official government document,"according to ABC News. The document was attached to updated voter registration cards that voters had requested.
“It’s an honest mistake. Between the time the voter [who caught the mistake] came in to our front counter to get her card and we were notified of the error, the mistake had been corrected,” Yvonne Reed, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Department of Elections, told ABC News. Reed said the document with the mistake was sent to fewer than 50 people.
The error comes as other states' voter-identification laws have been challenged in court by Democrats who say conservative state legislatures are trying to tamp down voter turnout. In Philadelphia, a billboard put up by the state displays the slogan "Si Quieres Votar Muéstrala," which means "if you want to vote, show it."
The billboard shows a woman showing her driver's license, according to Bloomberg News. But a court ruling in early October ordered Pennsylvania election officials to allow voters without government-issued photo ID to vote.
Also recently, a store manager in Harrisonburg, Va., found eight completed voter registration forms in a bag of trash, according to NBC29.
"We don't know what the motive was to throw these away," Rockingham County Voter Registrar Doug Geib told the local NBC station. "But I don't think it was based on that … because there's no way the people collecting the applications would know what party, what candidate these people are going to vote for."
HuffPost's Dan Froomkin reported on Tuesday that some elderly, African-American and Spanish-speaking voters in Florida and Virginia have received phone calls aimed at deceiving them or intimidating them into not voting on Election Day.
The Virginia State Board of Electionshas warned residents that "some Virginia voters, particularly older Virginians, received phone calls from unidentified individuals informing voters that they can vote over the phone. This information is false."
To fight back against the efforts of conservative group True the Vote, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) launched an inquiry into whether the group is illegally trying to remove thousands of voters from the registration rolls.
"At some point, an effort to challenge voter registrations by the thousands without any legitimate basis may be evidence of illegal voter suppression," Cummings wrote in a letter to True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht in early October, according tothe Los Angeles Times. "If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights."