honorentheos wrote:Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:So. How many polling stations have been closed across Georgia and where are they all located?
- Doc
The reason I went back to check your source date was because of the number of articles that came up when looking at Georgia right after the Supreme Court essentially shut down the voters rights act protections that would have forced Georgia to show these moves weren't racially disciminatory. It seems to be a big issue in Georgia for a couple of years now, with everything from cost cutting to facility adequacey issues being cited. The County in your study ultimately did close 7 stations in 2016. Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, backed off of closures in 2017 after it was sued. In that lawsuit it was noted that none of the polling stations proposed for closure were in White-majority precincts.
On the same theme, across the states that were under preclearance with the voting rights act prior to the Shelby decision invalidating that need,
approximately 868 polling locations were closed leading into the 2016 election. In the words of the report I linked, counties and states with a history of racial voting discrimination closed polling places on a massive scale. This did not match a national theme, but rather was concentrated in areas historically dominated by segregationism. They were closed because it places a disproportionate burden on likely Democratic voters which specifically hits blacks disproportionately. If you ask individual actors in this systemic issue, they are likely to give different reasons because making it harder to vote on the basis of race is
illegal. But much like voter ID laws having a sham justification in preventing near non-existent in-person voter fraud, the real reason for the actions seems patently clear from the pattern of behavior.
There's a whole range of GOP voter suppression policies in various states quite clearly aimed at making Democrats less likely to vote and accomplishing this by targeting racial minorities who are likely to vote Democrat. In my personal favorite example, North Carolina commissioned a study on black voter behavior, discovered that there's a huge surge in early black voting during a particular traditional black church event called "Souls to the Polls" and then banned early voting specifically on a Sunday in which it would occur. This is part of what the NC Supreme Court called targeting African Americans with almost
"surgical precision."That whites as a class aren't especially targeted like this is a form of "white privilege" if you live in the United States. Of course, this benefit occurs on average and its effects are felt by individuals differently. It also isn't the only type of electioneering that occurs. But even if you aren't directly impacted, if you live in an area where this is happening, you wouldn't be wrong to know if you belong to a class that is discriminated against or for.
Right now, the GOP is vastly more interested in preventing voters from going to the polls than Democrats are. In fact, Democrats aren't nearly as good as Republicans at electioneering, and to the extent they engage in it, a lot of their efforts go into expanding franchise through policies like automatic voter registration. I'm certain that part of this is differences in the civic culture of both parties. That said, it probably is also in significant part a coincidence of the fact that it is in the Democrats' interest to see more people vote since they do better among fringe voters, but it doesn't strictly matter why that it is the case. All that matters for purposes of this discussion is that there is a powerful political group successfully targeting racial minorities to make it harder for them to vote because they would prefer that they don't vote.