For two years in rural Georgia, residents fought to reopen the closed polling place. Their win is a rare expansion of in-person voting access since the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
When local election officials shut down a polling site in a predominantly black area of a rural Georgia county, displaced voters couldn’t look to the federal government to intervene as it once did in areas with a history of racial disenfranchisement.
Most of the African American residents of Hazlehurst, about 100 miles west of Savannah amid pine forests and cotton fields, have voted at the polling site for years and were surprised when it was closed in August 2017. They were reassigned to a new, consolidated poll across town just as the Georgia governor’s race was beginning to heat up.“We couldn’t understand or see why the poll was closed,” Helen Allen said in a recent interview.
Julie Houk, managing counsel for election protection for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said polling site closures can create tremendous barriers for voters, especially those with low incomes or no personal vehicle, and they are too often carried out in minority communities.
A recent report from civil rights group Leadership Conference Education Fund found 1,688 polling place closures between 2012 and 2018 in areas previously subject to the Voting Rights Act preclearance requirement that was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 2013. Advocates say the stakes are especially high less than a year ahead of elections with the presidential contest and two U.S. Senate races on the ballot in Georgia.
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