Why many voters in Arizona, Missouri will use voting centers, not precincts, on Election Day

When many Arizona voters show up to cast a ballot in the Aug. 2 primary, they will be able to choose from several vote centers rather than one assigned precinct.

Maricopa County officials predict that 10% to 17% of voters will mark their ballots at one of 210 voting centers. The majority of Arizonans will still cast ballots by mail or in person at early voting sites.

Arizona state law has allowed counties to use vote centers entirely or along with assigned polling sites for about a decade. Most Arizonans now live in a county that offers vote centers. Pima County will use vote centers for the first time Aug. 2. St Louis County in Missouri, which introduced vote centers in 2020, will again use them Tuesday.

Voting rights advocates, election officials and academics say there are benefits to breaking away from the traditional precinct model, though it depends on staff, technology and location. 

"Vote centers represent a promising election reform that can simultaneously benefit voters and election officials, may boost voter participation, and can reduce the number of voters who lose the opportunity to cast a ballot and have it counted because they show up at the wrong precinct or cannot make it to their own precinct on Election Day," the group All Voting is Local, which advocates for removing discriminatory barriers to voting, said in a 2020 report.

The group added that "like any change in voting procedures, a shift to vote centers has the potential to help or to harm some groups of voters."

Not everyone likes the vote center model, but it has drawn far less debate and misinformation than voting by mail. 

Scott Doyle, county clerk in Larimer County, Colorado, came up with the idea for vote centers two decades ago.

Doyle told reporters at the time that vote centers would save costs of complying with the federal Help America Vote Act, which required elections officials to replace outdated voting machines. In a traditional precinct model, voters are assigned one site to vote on Election Day. Under a vote center model, voters can go to any site. 

In 2003, Larimer scrapped the previous 143 precincts and set up 22 vote centers. In 2004, Colorado passed a bill to allow vote centers. 

The concept drew interest from other states, and now 18 states allow jurisdictions to use vote centers on Election Day: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa (for some elections), Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Additional states allow for vote centers during early voting.

Vote centers, also called "vote anywhere" sites, require technology, including printers, that allows any voter in the county to receive an appropriate ballot.

In each election, any county in the U.S. may have hundreds or even thousands of versions of the ballot that voters will cast depending upon their address and party affiliation covering local, state and federal races. Maricopa County alone has more than 19,000 ballot styles for the primary.

Election officials who have successfully implemented vote centers have found benefits

It’s easier to mitigate long lines and other mishaps.: Under a traditional precinct model, if a site had a long line or broken equipment, voters had to wait or return later. Now they can choose another site or look up estimated wait times. Recent flooding in St Louis County, Missouri, prompted some polling sites to close for the Aug. 2 primary, but it shouldn’t affect Election Day operations, said Eric Fey, one of the county’s elections directors. "People can just go to the next one down the street."

Voters no longer show up at the wrong location. With vote centers, voters have more options to try on Election Day; there’s no need for panicked calls to the elections office to find their assigned polling site. 

Fewer provisional ballots. Provisional ballots are given to voters when there are questions about their eligibility, including if they’re voting at the wrong site. Vote centers would eliminate the need for provisional ballots for that purpose. 

St. Louis County, Missouri, transitioned to vote centers in 2020 to cope with pandemic-related shortages in precincts and poll workers.

The county reduced the number of polling places from 438 in the 2016 general election to 230 in the 2020 general election.

The county saved roughly $80,000 on printing ballots and $20,000 in rental fees paid to polling venues. Even after increasing poll worker pay because of the pandemic, those costs were more than $35,000 lower in 2020 compared with 2016. All told, the 2020 election’s total cost was almost $200,000 less than in 2016, researchers found. 

Rice University Professor Robert Stein has published multiple papers on vote centers and found they can increase turnout, particularly among infrequent voters and in elections with lower turnout.

But location is key.

"You open a Walmart and put it in the wrong place — no one is going to go there," Stein said.

In Arizona, some critics of vote centers appear motivated by the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen, a myth debunked by courts and government officials including in former President Donald Trump’s own administration.

Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, a Republican running for secretary of state, recently quote-tweeted a conservative activist who was critical of Maricopa’s vote center model. "Bring back precincts," Finchem tweeted. "They are there for a reason." Finchem is part of a national coalition of Republicans that wants nearly everyone to vote in person on Election Day.

All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy group, says county officials should analyze whether voters of color or voters with disabilities will be disadvantaged by the location of potential sites and seek feedback from these groups before they pick the sites. 

When Maricopa first used vote centers for the presidential preference primary in 2016, it resulted in long lines, sometimes hourslong. After being sued, the county added more vote centers, voting booths and stations to check in voters. The changes succeeded in cutting waits; Votebeat reported that for the 2020 general election, Maricopa County wait times were on average two minutes.

In May, Chinese American and Korean American residents in Los Angeles noticed that there were no planned vote centers in their neighborhoods. Community leaders worked with the government to find spaces that met the requirements, leading them to open three new centers within a span of a few weeks, according to LAist. 

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