Voter suppression is real: Lines to vote tend to be twice as long in communities of color.
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‘Election day started an hour ago in my neighborhood and we don’t have chords to plug in the voting machines. We all knew voting was today. People are waiting after the polls opened to vote. … This is what we call voter suppression. This is what we go through to vote.’

‘We all knew voting was today. And only in my neighborhood people are waiting an hour after the polls opened to vote.’

Nicole Austin-Hillery: ‘There were many examples of voter suppression manifesting itself during the midterm elections this season, and we saw how voter suppression, when it rears its ugly head, has a greater impact on communities of color, on students, on poor communities. One of those was with respect to voting machines.’

‘We saw that in many urban areas where the majority of voters at those precincts were people of color or were poor people, they were coming to precincts were voting machines either weren’t working or were there simply weren’t enough put in place. Well, what do you think happens with that. What happens is that there are long lines, people are waiting for an exorbitant amount amount of time. And for many voters, they know they can’t afford to stand in line for 2, 3, or maybe more hours to cast their vote.’

Minority voters are 6x six times as likely as white voters to wait over an hour to vote and lines tend to be twice as long in minority communities. Non-white communities lost an average of 7 polling places & 200 poll workers from 2012 to 2016, making lines longer at remaining polling places.

Nicole Austin-Hillery: ‘There are many Americans again, particularly in urban minority communities, who have jobs where they may get an hour off if that to go and vote. For some of them they don’t get any time off and they’ve got to figure out how do I fit it in between carpooling, how do I fit it in between elder care for my parents, how do I fit it in between making sure that I get to the office in enough time to punch my clock so that my payroll is not docked. Those are serious issues and that is the kind of suppression that we saw manifest itself on Election Day.’

In response to some of the issues and problems that voters were facing on election day, there were lawsuits that were filed by lawyers across the country.

#Midterms #Voting #VotingRights #VoterSuppression #Georgia #Politics

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