For the second time in as many weeks, election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona are in hot water for providing Hispanic voters with false information about when election day is.
Last week, ThinkProgress reported on how Maricopa County Elections Department officials attached a document to voter registration forms that gave the wrong date for anyone reading it in Spanish. The English version of the same document provides the correct date — November 6 — next to “8 de Noviembre.”
At the time, county officials dismissed the error as a clerical mistake, saying that only 50 people received the incorrect document. But a local ABC News affiliate has uncovered at least one more incident of the wrong date being disseminated in Spanish by Maricopa’s Elections Department.
Paper bookmarks found in three separate election counters throughout the county again give November 8th as election day, and again the mistake is reserved to just the Spanish version of the document. Activists who were perhaps willing to overlook the first incident as a genuine mistake are no longer keeping quiet:
Randy Parraz, President of Citizens For A Better Arizona, says the blame lies squarely with Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell.“It shows she’s incompetent and not qualified,” said Parraz.[…]“The moment you found the first problem, there should have been an inventory,” said Parraz, referring to the voter ID document. “Anyone with common sense would have done an inventory on everything that’s been printed to catch this.”
Maricopa County happens to be the home of the controversial and xenophobic Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has led the nation’s most anti-Latino police force for years.