Something fishy is going down in Georgia over their plan to close all seven polling station is a majority black community their claim is that they don’t meet the requirement for disability access but the ACLU is calling foul.
.Election officials in a rural southwest Georgia county are defending a plan to suddenly close seven of the county’s nine polling places against allegations of racial discrimination, saying the ones it wants to close are not sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities.
Odd that the article doesn’t clarify who exactly the county officials are, or what their background is. Are they members of the KKK, BLM, or somewhere in between? One would think that might have some relevance to the story.
North Carolina did similar stuff. They took voting places off of college campuses and ended voting prior to the “souls to the polls” Sunday (that black churches used to get congregations to the polls).
These sleazy people are exactly as I described them.
A few things here. This is the result of the Obama DOJ ordering them to bring their polling places into ADA compliance. Problem is, some of these polling places aren’t government property, so they can’t really spend government money on them. In addition, it’s a small county, like 7k people, many of them poor, which means, they don’t have a lot of cash to throw at bringing the others up to compliance. So how about a compromise, the feds should either wave the ADA compliance or give them the cash to upgrade.
I live in northern GA, and honestly this is the first time I ever recall that area making the news. It looks like that county is very rural - and my experience with smaller towns / counties in GA like this one is that the elected officials usually work part time and don’t really have the budget to keep facilities up to modern standards.
I’m thinking this is an issue where the county may have financial issues trying to get into compliance with federal regulations.
I see in that article that the Secretary of the State (and gubernatorial candidate), Brian Kemp, has advised them to ditch that proposal. Additionally, the other candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams, has weighed in as well:
Republican Brian Kemp, who as secretary of state oversees elections, said through a spokeswoman his office advised the county to ditch the proposal. His Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, said closing the sites would infringe on the rights of voters to “have their voice represented at the voting booth and in our government.”
Dunno, I read in one article where some county guy said many of them weren’t government buildings, can’t ind it again yet, here is the list of the ones they are closing. And I know that it isn’t uncommon for things like churches to be used as polling places in some areas.
Cuthbert:
Springvale
Coleman
Carnegie
Cuthbert Middle School
Benevolence
Shellman:
Fountain Bridge
Fourth District
I am looking for what the locations were. The other question I have is, if this is a Democratic county, it voted Hillary by 11 points in the last election, and a majority black county, which it is, how did some supposedly racist guy sneak onto the county elections board to suppress the black vote? His name is Todd Black from what I read but I can’t find anything out about the guy so far.
Within twelve (12) months of the effective date of this Agreement, using the survey instrument at Attachment F, the County will survey all polling places not surveyed by the Department to identify barriers to access by people with disabilities in the parking, exterior route to the entrance, entrance, interior route to the voting area, and voting area. For each such polling place, the County will then either (1) ensure that all barriers to access by people with disabilities have been removed or (2) identify an alternate polling place with no barriers to access by people with disabilities. That identification of accessible polling places will utilize the survey instrument that appears as Attachment F to this Agreement. The County will then take immediate steps to change each new inaccessible polling place to a new accessible location. Under this provision of the Agreement, the County will ensure that barriers at each polling place the Department did not survey are either removed or a substitute accessible polling place is in operation before the next election occurring more than twelve (12) months after the effective date of this Agreement.
So they didn’t have the money to bring them into compliance and just shut them down and designated a place that was compliant that could handle the load, I read they consulted some PHD wonk at a University who found doing so would reduce lines and wait times by a wide margin.
“But whether the problems come at the polls or before them, Lerner notes that New Yorker’s persistent voting issues stem from our lawmakers’ failures. “New York State does nothing to inform voters. We make it extraordinarily, unnecessarily difficult to vote in this state, then our elected officials ring their hands about low voter turnout,” she told Gothamist. “It’s not surprising that people are completely confused.”
Hmmm…
I get a card in the mail from BOE about 1 month before an Election Day that has the date of election and my polling place on it. I just got the card for the primary in Sept. last week.
My polling place is a church. I don’t think that is considered public property.
I’d be fine with having the government help front some cash to get the locations up to standard for the ADA. We’ve spent money on far more wasteful projects.
