It is what they do. Its their own incompetence and hatred of the "other" resulted in this mess.
Making it hard to get to the polling place in poor and non-white areas solidifies the majority's grip on power. It stuff's down change and progress.
Any Democratic gain in AZ would be progress, and the Republicans can't have that. So to answer your question, the Republicans have more to gain than Hillary at suppression of the vote. Are they sitting around some smoke filled back room cackling about their plan to suppress the vote? Probably not. But their disinterest the plight of non-whites, and the poor, leads them to say "fuck those guys, I don't want to pay for polling places for them in Phoenix" There's the racism and bigotry.
Hillary is good at her job as a politician. She believes keeping her trap shut in this situation is the smartest play. Might not be the play we, the liberal, the progressive, and the Left, want her to play, but its the smart typical political way to go. By being quiet, she gives the Republicans all the rope they need to hang themselves on this issue. And hang themselves they are.
Now Bernie disagrees with that. He's a full throated roar guy, and so are his followers. They shake trees and rage at the storm. That's also right and good to do, but gives the R's less rope to hang themselves. They'll still hang themselves, because they're so inept in Arizona they can't help but do so. And through Bernie's tactic we, on the left, get to have fun shouting about it too. Because if Bernie does it (or any other pol for that matter), that gives us implied permission to do the same.
Consider this, who owns this "computer clearance"? Who has to keep track of party affiliation for Arizona's closed primary system? Who prints the ballots? Who buys and administers the voting machines? The polling places are neutral, its not like the caucus system where parties meet in different locations, these are the actual polling places that are used in every election, be it primary or general.
The answer to that question is the State and the county after that. Since AZ is deep red and Democrats have the smallest of toe-holds there, the systems are controlled by the Republicans. There is no way Hillary Clinton has anything to do with those systems. She or her national staff can't have touched them in any way. As for local Democrats, keep in mind that in Maricopia county out of five board supervisors, four are Republicans. You don't seriously think they are in cahoots with Hillary Clinton do you?
I'm not saying shenanigans didn't occur in Arizona, they did. I'm saying there's "zero chance" Hillary had anything to do with it. It was the Republican controlled government that closed the polling places in the past 4 years. It was the Republican controlled government that holds the computer system that tracks party affiliation, this is all on them.
Conservatives have a history of doing this stuff, one of the ironies of American politics is the Republican's spend a lot of time and energy crowing about how broken our election system is and why we need road blocks to register voters and also to have voter IDs and all that neo-Jim Crow stuff they yammer about, but they're the ones caught when the system goes pear shaped.
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