What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Happy Easter to all who are celebrating. Usually this Christian holiday falls during the Jewish festival of Passover, which is still weeks away. Kimberly Donnelly explains,

Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Passover, on the other hand, begins on the first full moon of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish lunar-based calendar.

The Jewish lunar calendar occasionally adds a leap month rather than the leap day we add to our solar calendar every fourth year. Passover is late in 2016 because a second month of Adar was added before the month of Nisan (often written Nissan).

In past years I’ve posted Easter and Passover related links here and here. A false claim about a Cedar Rapids Gazette front page headline on Easter Sunday figured prominently in University of Iowa Professor Stephen Bloom‘s 2011 hatchet job on our state, which provoked strong reactions from many Iowans.

Bernie Sanders swept yesterday’s caucuses in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii by wide margins. He also won the Utah and Idaho caucuses on March 22, while Hillary Clinton won the Arizona primary. The big story out of Arizona was disgraceful voter suppression, as officials reduced the number of polling places in the state’s largest county from 200 in 2012 to only 60 this year. That’s just 60 polling places for a county with a population much larger than Iowa’s. As Ari Berman explained, the long lines to vote in Arizona were a direct consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court majority “gutting” the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Republicans didn’t hold any nominating contests this weekend. The GOP caucuses in Alaska and Hawaii happened earlier this month, and Washington Republicans will vote in a May primary. On March 22, Ted Cruz won caucuses in Utah and Idaho by huge margins. John Kasich came in second in Utah, knocking Donald Trump to third place in a state for the first time this year. However, Trump crushed the competition in the Arizona primary, grabbing all of that state’s delegates.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that John Deeth’s speculation on what went wrong in Arizona is worth a read. A few excerpts are after the jump.

Deeth helps administer elections in Johnson County, so his perspective on the flawed Arizona primary is worth a read. Aside from the obvious point that Arizona no longer needed federal approval to reduce the number of polling places (because of that Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act), there were other problems.

There is an inevitable amount of resource-wasting in election administration, but every election we are balancing Likely Scenario against Worst Case Scenario. Past turnout and behavior in similar elections are the most accurate indicators. We are prepped for something MORE than we expect, but at the high end of the range we expect.

And we have back up plans just in case. In my county our polling places check in at least four times a day: 9 AM, 11 AM, 3 PM, 6 PM. This serves two purposes. It feeds the media beast with information. More importantly, it gives us an alert. There are long-established turnout patterns in our county. By the 11 AM check in, we have a good sense if a site is at risk of running out of ballots or other supplies (or in need of more workers), and we can ship more out the door. I don’t know if Maricopa County does something like this (they should) or if they were simply SO overwhelmed that they couldn’t do anything about it.

Clearly, Maricopa was under-prepared. Here’s some of my theories as to why. […]

As bad as it is that people didn’t get to vote – that’s ALWAYS bad – the uncast votes are almost certainly not enough to affect the 18 point margin Clinton had over Sanders, because most of the votes were cast early. Like many Western states (and like Johnson County) Arizona is a heavy early voting state. In most elections they see more votes early than on election day. They also have permanent absentee status. Check a box when you register, they mail you a ballot each election.

Early vote tends to be a leading indicator of election day votes. Officials know, or SHOULD know, the patterns of their communities. If I get X number of early votes, that probably means Y voters on Election Day.

But what happens when those ratios change?

That, I think, is what happened in Maricopa County. They closed early voting, saw X number of voters, and figured that was 90% of the total vote. (I’m just making up numbers; can’t find the exact breakdown on the real ones.) Then it turned out to only be 70% of the vote because interest peaked late. So they got three times what they expected on election day – with three times FEWER voting sites.