PHOENIX — Cynthia Perez, a lawyer, stopped by a polling site on her way to work here on Tuesday, thinking she could vote early and get on with her day. She changed her mind when she found a line so long she could not see the end of it.
The line was just as big when she came back in the middle of the afternoon — and bigger three hours later, after she had finally cast her ballot.
"To me," said Perez, 31, "this is not what democracy is about."
Two days later, angry and baffled voters are still trying to make sense of how democracy is working in Maricopa County, the state's most populous, where officials cut the number of polling places by 70 percent to save money — to 60 from 200 in the last presidential election. That translated to a single polling place for every 108,000 residents in Phoenix, a majority-minority city that had exceptional turnout in Tuesday's Democratic and Republican primaries.
All day, lines meandered along church courtyards, zigzagged along school parking lots and snaked around shadeless blocks as tens of thousands of voters waited to cast their ballots, including many independents who did not know that only those registered to a party could participate in the state's closed presidential primaries.
But beyond the electoral breakdown here, many observers saw Arizona as a flashing neon sign pointing toward potential problems ahead nationally when 16 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The presidential election will be the first since the Supreme Court's dismantling of a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, freeing nine states, including Arizona, and parts of seven others, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.
Wisconsin, which holds its primary elections April 5, is one of nine states with strict photo ID requirements. Thirty-three have some form of voter ID requirement. Kansas has enacted proof-of-citizenship requirements for all voter registration, a move that has disproportionately affected young voters and those attempting to register for the first time. North Carolina allows a registered voter to challenge the identity and eligibility of any voter casting a ballot in the same county.
On March 9, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a law that made it a felony to collect ballots for others and bring them to the polls.
"It's worrisome what the states are doing without these protections," said Allegra Chapman, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a watchdog group.
Arizona has a long history of discrimination against minorities, preventing American Indians from voting for much of its history because they were considered "wards of the nation," imposing English literacy tests to prospective voters and printing English-only election materials even as its Spanish-speaking population grew.
For 38 years, it had to seek federal approval for any changes to electoral rules and procedures, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. If the provision were still in place, the Justice Department would probably have barred the closing of polling places that led to hours of waiting, chaos and frustration.
Democrats and other critics say many of the new restrictions reflect a strategy by Republican legislatures to suppress the votes of minorities and other Democratic voters. Republicans contend they are needed to prevent voter fraud. But Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said the end of federal oversight in places like Arizona had opened the door to the chaos in Arizona.
"This doesn't appear to have been caused by the intention to make it harder for anyone to vote, but by bureaucratic incompetence," Hasen said. "Section 5 was very important in catching these screw-ups, a second pair of eyes that just aren't there anymore."
Long lines were nothing new in Maricopa. On Election Day in 2012, when more than three times as many polling places were open, voters who had signed up to cast their ballots by mail showed up in person instead, clogging polls, in particular in low-income and heavily Latino neighborhoods.
On Tuesday, calls poured into the office of Arizona's attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, well into the night, as people heard poll workers tell them to go home, "the election has already been decided," said a spokesman, Ryan Anderson. Ducey described the situation as "unacceptable" and called for presidential primaries open to all. Mayor Greg Stanton of Phoenix wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding an investigation.
The election "fiasco," Stanton said, "demonstrates the urgent need for an independent and thorough law enforcement investigation to safeguard one of the most sacred rights we have as citizens."
But the problems were not entirely unexpected. Arizona's Republican-led Legislature cut funding to county election offices last year; Maricopa election officials projected a $1.9 million shortfall to cover the costs of this year's elections.
After the chaos of Tuesday, state Sen. Kimberly Yee, a Republican, said she would amend one of the election bills making their way through the Legislature to require counties to operate a minimum number of polling sites. And state Rep. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, also a Republican, scheduled a public hearing for Monday to find out what went wrong.
"Arizona should have been better prepared," she said in a statement.
But Martín J. Quezada, a Democratic leader in the Senate, is unconvinced that the state is committed to doing better. In an interview on Thursday, he said a bill requiring counties to open up additional lines for provisional voters and early-ballot drop-offs during periods of long waits never came to a vote last year. Another, allowing early-voting sites to open on evenings and weekends leading up to an election, has not been heard this session.
"The fault goes to the entire Republican leadership," Quezada said. "They have created a culture of placing less importance on elections, less importance on voting, and who have had no reservations to sacrifice democracy if it accomplishes their objectives."