Gina Swoboda, executive director of Phoenix-based Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) discussed election problems and what to do about them recently on the Jenny Beth Show. Jenny Beth Martin was an early leader in the Tea Party movement as co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. In this third part of a three-part series from the interview, Swoboda delved deeper into the problems that occurred during Maricopa County’s 2022 election, many which were caused or exacerbated by election officials, and the hurdles to fixing them.
She observed that switching from precinct voting to vote centers did not increase turnout as election officials claimed it would, which they did in order to convince voters the switch would be beneficial. Republican legislators ran bills that would have made precinct voting easier, she said, like holding voting on a school holiday so the schools could be used as voting locations, but the bills were unsuccessful.
“And then the pushback from advocates on the left end of the spectrum was, well, now you’re making it impossible,” Swoboda said. “If the kids have the day off, then how am I gonna get the time to go vote now, now I can’t work. So people that were not concerned about shutting down every school in the United States of America for 22 months during COVID, and did not care about how those parents were gonna go to work, suddenly think having one day as a holiday — and these are the same people who say it should be a national holiday.”
“I’ve come to the conclusion after the last session of a legislature that the county election officials in the state of Arizona are not going to do anything to improve the Election Day process because they do not want to, because they do not have the will to continue to have in-person voting,” she said.
Read the rest of the article at The Arizona Sun Times