“A battleground fight over polling places and voting rights in Georgia”

CPI:

The national spotlight in recent weeks has fallen, improbably, on Lincoln County, a “sportsman’s paradise” of about 7,700 people that lies along the South Carolina border. Local election officials have proposed consolidating all seven polling places into the county’s recreation complex, a single larger centralized site. The county voted 68% for former President Donald Trump last year, and less than one-third of the population is Black.

Georgia is the epicenter of the voting rights fight, so much so that President Joe Biden chose it as the site of a major speech on voting rights this month. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Republicans in the state approved a massive overhaul of election laws that added new restrictions on absentee voting and changed rules in the wake of false claims of fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump, one of the most high-profile examples of a series of GOP-backed restrictive state voting laws passed around the country.

Into this charged atmosphere came the Lincoln County plan. Some voting advocates described it as an example of voter suppression.

But local election officials say they proposed consolidation because the county doesn’t have enough resources for the current configuration and more voters are casting absentee and early ballots. They promised to provide transportation to voters who need it and said the change would let them offer Election Day voters a better site and access to more voting machines. 

A Public Integrity/GPB analysis of voter rolls, polling place locations and other election data showed no more than a few hundred voters cast ballots at each polling place in the past three general elections.

According to that same analysis:

Around three-quarters of the county’s votes were cast via early or absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election and 58% in the 2018 midterms.

With the consolidated location, the median distance to travel to the polls would increase by about a mile for Black voters and nearly three miles for white voters.

Voters in the most rural regions of the county, though, would have farther to go. An analysis of voter records shows 75% of voters would be within eight miles of the proposed new polling site. The current polling places are all within that radius.

The data did not include race information for 386 voters. Precise locations for 122 voters were not available. 

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