Supporters of Bernie Sanders listen to his speech at a rally on March 22, 2016, in San Diego. | AP Photo Bernie's supporters rage against Arizona voting delays

Calling Arizona's administration of last night's Democratic primary "a disgrace," Bernie Sanders suggested Wednesday that turnout was significantly tamped down as a result of the long lines voters faced.

While Sanders didn't directly question the outcome of the race -- which Hillary Clinton won easily, 58 percent to 40 percent -- the Vermont senator and his angry supporters implied that thousands of voters may have been denied the opportunity to cast ballots.


Starting out the day at a news conference in San Diego, Sanders described how he got an email from an Arizona woman who waited five hours to vote.

"We do not know how many thousands of people who wanted to vote yesterday in Arizona did not vote. We don't know if they wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or whoever," he said. "But in the United States of America, democracy is the foundation of our way of life. People should not have to wait five hours to vote and what happened yesterday in Arizona is a disgrace."

While the defeat did not come as a surprise -- Clinton had a large lead in recent polls -- Sanders' loss to the former secretary of state nevertheless hit a nerve among his supporters and even members of his campaign team. Campaign manager Jeff Weaver griped Tuesday night after the race had been called for Clinton that there's "something wrong with the numbers, and I think once we see where they come down, it may end up being a split of delegates basically in Arizona."

State Sen. Martin Quezada, who endorsed the Vermont senator, pointed out that there were only 60 polling locations in Maricopa County compared to the last presidential election where there were 200.

"I think that candidates from all sides, not only Sen. Sanders but also Secretary Clinton and the Republican candidates as well -- I think that a lot of their campaigns should be very upset about the way that these races were handled yesterday," Quezada told POLITICO. "In particular, I think the districts like mine out in the West Valley which is a very poor, very high minority community, we were impacted to a greater extent. The longer lines had a huge impact on our voters. The lack of polling places within a reasonable distance were a huge impact for us and I think that as a result some of the campaigns that might have taken voters from those communities may have suffered more than other campaigns. And I think that's a very legitimate concern that the campaigns should have."

On social media, Sanders' supporters voiced their fury within hours of the close of voting. A reddit thread titled "Arizona is a massive FRAUD" had over 2,500 comments by early afternoon Wednesday.

"The Democratic primary in Arizona is pure massive election rigging!' wrote the reddit user who started the thread, pointing to the long lines and lack of enough ballots. "There is no way that this primary process is not intentionally plagued with so many voting problems. You could at first believe this is just badly organized and full of negligence, but this is only the excuse that is used to hide a much bigger and serious problem: election rigging."

"Bernie needs to call this s--t out, Maricopa County had long lines of 3-4 hours plus and people still in line to vote at 11pm yet apparently a county of 4 million only had 30,000 votes yesterday!?" another user on a pro-Sanders Facebook page said. "Bernie won 60%-40% with people who voted yesterday btw... this whole process is a scam and I'm disgusted."

Complaints about the election weren't limited to Sanders and his supporters. Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey on Wednesday released a statement saying state officials needed to evaluate the Arizona voting process.

"I’m glad to see so many Arizonans step up to make their voice heard for the candidate of their choice. However, it’s unacceptable that many of them had to battle incredibly long lines," Ducey said in a statement "Our election officials must evaluate what went wrong and how they make sure it doesn’t happen again."

Sanders campaign officials on Wednesday said the campaign was reviewing the complaints before it decides how to proceed.

"We're assessing all the calls that we've seen of problems with the polls and we're going to review them and find the best way to address them," Sanders state director Jose Miranda said. "We're going to look at all of it and try and identify the problems. How we pursue -- we're first going to have to identify what happened and move from there."

"I think a lot of people were upset and rightfully so," added Miranda.

"We thought we were seeing very good performance in key precincts so when the numbers came in lower than we anticipated that was surprising," Sanders chief strategist Tad Devine said. "I don't want to attribute it to anything that I don't know enough about. I'm not going to make any charges but I do think it's something that we have to try to understand better. We're going to do that today and tomorrow."

