PHOENIX — For the first time in as long as anyone can remember, Arizona’s largest public school district isn’t opening its schools to voters as polling sites.

The reasons have been building for years, but the final straw for Mesa Public Schools officials came last November with a small, low-turnout election that became mired in misinformation and menace.

“It was very chaotic,” Assistant Superintendent Scott Thompson recalled. “It was overwhelming.”

Although voting was supposed to be done mostly by mail, mistrust led many voters to drive to the schools to fill out their ballots in person, causing traffic jams and confrontations. Voters confused school staff for election workers and harangued them. Some accused school staff of “disenfranchising voters” for hosting secure ballot drop boxes.

“I couldn’t imagine it in 2024,” Thompson said. “We just don’t know how to make it work.”

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In the eight years since Donald Trump was first on the ballot, hundreds of schools throughout this fiercely contested battleground county are no longer willing to assume the risks associated with holding elections. In 2016, 37 percent of county polling locations were schools, according to a Washington Post analysis of data obtained through a public records request. So far this year, it’s 14 percent.

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