Deputies of sheriff with record of ethnic profiling will be ‘stationed around the valley’ as activists raise concerns for Latino community

Joe Arpaio, the controversial sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has been charged with criminal contempt in a racial discrimination case, is preparing to deploy his deputies at polling stations on election day in a move that voting rights activists warn amounts to intimidation.



Poll workers assigned to the county’s 640 polling places have been instructed by the election recorder, Helen Purcell, to contact Arpaio’s office for all non-life threatening police needs on election day. Principals whose schools have polling places have also been told that Arpaio’s deputies will be “stationed around the valley for easy dispatch should there be any need for an officer”.

But voting rights activists warn that deploying Arpaio’s officers will itself serve as intimidation, given the sheriff’s track record of ethnic profiling, harassment and organized raids directed against undocumented Hispanic people. Arpaio is locked in a tense re-election fight on 8 November, as a growing number of Latino citizens and allied progressives seek to oust him as sheriff after 23 years in the post.

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“The presence of Arpaio’s deputies would be intimidation,” said Samantha Pstross, president of the Arizona Commission for Election Accountability, a coalition of non-partisan voting rights groups. “They consistently treat voters differently based on the color of their skin, so why would they do any differently on election day, especially given that their boss is running for re-election?

“This is a recipe for disaster,” she added.

Arizona is one of several states where activists fear potential intimidation and vigilantism at polling stations, whipped up by the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed widespread voter fraud and a “rigged” election. The activists fear that the Republican presidential candidate is promoting hostility by repeatedly exhorting his followers to act as poll watchers, particularly in areas with large African American or other minority populations.

Arizona is one of nine states where federal election monitors will be present in significantly depleted numbers on Tuesday, as a result of a 2013 supreme court ruling, Shelby County v Holder, which gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The judgment freed the states, most of which are in the deep south, from federal controls designed to prevent disenfranchisement of minority voters stretching back to Jim Crow era of racial segregation.

As a result of Shelby, election monitors from the Department of Justice will be spread much thinner on the ground in Arizona on Tuesday, and their powers to enter and monitor polling places sharply curtailed. Voting rights campaigners fear that will leave voters vulnerable to potential intimidation.

Arpaio is now acting as a lightning rod for many of those fears. A passionate supporter of Trump’s insurgent bid for the US presidency, the 84-year-old styles himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” and has a long history of run-ins with the federal courts to prove it.

Last week, federal prosecutors charged Arpaio with criminal contempt of court, for allegedly violating an order by continuing to arrest immigrants with no evidence they had broken any state law. That came on top of a 2007 civil lawsuit that found against him in a claim that he racially profiled Latinos.

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One of his most contentious techniques over the years has been to conduct mass raids of factories where undocumented Latinos are suspected to be working, rounding them up and then detaining anyone lacking appropriate immigration paperwork.

“He is hated and feared by the Latino community here,” Pstross said. “Especially hated, which is why the very presence of a sheriff’s deputy in a high-Latino population neighbourhood will cause problems on election day.”

Arizona has voted Republican in every presidential election since Bill Clinton’s re-election bid in 1996. But this year, the race gave Democrats enough hope that they sent in a stream of high-profile figures to campaign in the state, from Hillary Clinton herself to her vice-presidential pick, Tim Kaine, and Michelle Obama. Arpaio has insisted he is still investigating Barack Obama’s birthplace, although even Trump gave up his five years of conspiracy claims about the president in September.

Pollsters attribute the race’s tightening to a surge in Latino voter registration and interest. In early voting, Hispanics now form 13% of the early ballots cast, compared with 11% in 2012.

Outside money has also poured into Arpaio’s race for re-election, as his detractors have sensed a chance to finally unseat him. The progressive philanthropist and financier George Soros invested $2m into the Super Pac Maricopa Strong to pay for a series of TV attack ads on the sheriff.

In the light of the revelation that Arpaio’s office will have a leading role in controlling poling stations on Tuesday, one of the supervisors of county affairs in Maricopa, Steve Gallardo, has written to Purcell, the election recorder, asking her to reconsider her decision to call on sheriff’s deputies.

“Neither the sheriff nor his office has a good relationship with segments of our communities and voters,” the letter says. “It is unfortunate, but the reality of using Maricopa County deputies when the sheriff himself is in a very contentious re-election race and given his proven actions against citizens’ rights may be perceived as voter intimidation.”