PHOENIX β Parting ways with members of his own party, Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday he wants to keep the state's presidential primary and open it up to currently disenfranchised political independents.
Ducey said in a prepared statement he found it "unacceptable'' that voters in the state's largest county had to wait in long lines Tuesday β with some voters saying they had five-hour waits β simply to cast a ballot.
"Our election officials must evaluate what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn't happen again,'' the governor said. And Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell has admitted she severely underestimated the number of people who would decide to go to the polls on Election Day.
Ducey said part of the problem appears to be that a large number of independents sought to vote despite the fact that current Arizona law limits the presidential primary to only those registered with the parties whose candidates are being selected.
Preliminary figures from Maricopa County show there were 23,000 people issued "provisional'' ballots on Tuesday.
Those include people who showed up and insisted on voting despite the fact their names could not be found on the voter rolls of any of the parties holding primaries. More to the point, those votes will not count unless they can show they were, in fact, registered with a party.
"That's just wrong,'' the governor said. "If people want to take the time to vote they should be able to, and their vote should be counted.''
The comments come a month after the House, largely along party lines, voted to make Tuesday's vote the last-ever presidential primary.
That move came at the behest of Secretary of State Michele Reagan. She told lawmakers there was no reason for the state to finance the quadrennial event what with nearly 37 percent of the state's 3.2 million registered voters being unable to participate by virtue of not being registered with a political party that is choosing a candidate.
And Reagan said she had no indication that the parties would voluntarily go along with opening the system to independents.
The legislation would leave it to each party to decide how to choose its presidential candidates in 2020 and beyond. That could be everything from a caucus system to having the parties contract with β and pay β counties to run their own closed primaries.
Gubernatorial press aide Daniel Scarpinato said his boss opposes the legislation. He said the governor not only wants to keep the state-run presidential primary but open it up to everyone.
"The governor's view is that people who take the time to vote who are registered voters, that their votes should be counted,'' he said. "The fact that more people want to participate is a good thing.''
