The Voting Rights Institute today called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Daphne, Alabama’s City Council’s March 21 decision to reduce the number of polling places in the city from five to two. The city’s decision forces residents of one of the only districts with a sizable black population to travel more than two and a half miles away from their current polling place, while preserving the polling locations for most of the city’s heavily white districts.
“This is exactly the type of voting change that would have had to have been precleared by the Department of Justice before the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in Shelby County v. Holder,” said Harry Baumgarten, Legal Fellow with the Voting Rights Institute. “In gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court has opened the door for these potentially discriminatory measures to be passed and implemented throughout the country.”