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Thousands of people waited in line for hours to vote in the primary on March 22, 2016 in Arizona. (David Kadlubowski | The Arizona Republic via AP)

Remember when tens of thousands of people waited in the hot sun to vote in the very first election of the independent nation of South Sudan?



It was just like Arizona's 2016 presidential primary election, except the lines in the South Sudanese capital were shorter.



Seeing as Arizona isn't a new democracy born of a war-torn nation, it's not inspiring to watch people wait five hours to vote there. It's just outrageous.

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Some folks didn't get to cast their ballots until midnight, hours after the election had been called for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Others were told by poll workers to go home because the race had already been decided.



Elderly people saw the mass of cars in the parking lots and voters standing in the heat and simply gave up. They were furious at being disenfranchised.



Someday, this could be you. Dozens of states, including New Jersey, curtailed or refused to expand voting rights in recent years, thanks to Republican lawmakers and governors who swore their only motivation was to avoid fraud or save money.



But the fact remains that the rate of voter fraud in this country is minuscule. And if these politicians truly cared about protecting your rights, wouldn't they also pass measures that help improve voter turnout?

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We've known since the 2012 presidential election that long lines are a problem, particularly in minority precincts. Yet instead of offering remedies, the GOP has pushed strict new photo ID requirements, blocked early voting and easier means of registration.



The mayor of Arizona's largest city, Phoenix, is now calling for the Justice Department to investigate, but here's what we know already: Arizona is one of nine states that used to have to clear any changes to its voting practices with the feds first, because of a history of discriminating against minority voters.



Now it no longer has to do so, thanks to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated key parts of the Voting Rights Act. So when Republicans slashed polling locations in the most populated county by 70 percent -- translating to a single polling place for every 108,000 residents in Phoenix, compared with one for every 2,500 voters in the rest of the state -- the feds weren't looking over their shoulders.



The most heavily Latino areas reportedly had the fewest polling places, and Republicans looked the other way while critics sounded the alarm in the weeks before the election. All reasons to be suspicious.



But whether this was sabotage or just plain stupid, what happened should serve as lesson to the rest of the nation, New Jersey included. Don't forget that Gov. Christie vetoed a package of bills that would have made it easier to vote by opening the polls a couple weeks early and on Saturdays, to give working people more time to cast their ballots.



At the time, he said this "risks the integrity and orderly administration of our elections by introducing a new voting method and process." Nonsense. Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia already have in-person early voting. It helps ensure that if there's a problem on Election Day, we avoid the cataclysmic result we saw in Arizona.



Congress needs to restore the Voting Rights Act, too, by coming up with a new, legally valid formula to identify and monitor states that have a history of problems with discrimination. We don't want to see what happened in Arizona replicated across the country on Election Day 2016.



We're among world's oldest modern democracies. Let's try to be more efficient than South Sudan.

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