North Carolina Republicans have been actively moving the goalposts—they’ve been moving polling places around like a crazed monkey on crack. They have been cutting numbers of polling places in some counties, increasing numbers in other counties. There has been no systematic analysis of the effect of this. All I’ve been able to find in any news outlet is, you know: a little local newspaper, say Winston-Salem’s, will say: “the number of early voting sites is twelve this year…by the way, it was fifteen last year.” That’s it. Nobody has taken an overall view. […]
The headline outcome from our analysis is that in 2014 white voters—71% of the electorate in North Carolina—had to travel an additional 119,000 miles from their homes to their nearest Early Voting locations…which is approximately equivalent to halfway from the Earth to the Moon.
I hear you ask, “how did it affect black voters?” Well, black voters—22% of the electorate—had to travel to the moon and halfway home again, 370,000 miles, in 2014, to get to their nearest Early Voting place. […]
Will be interesting to see if these stats pan out and if so what legal action might arise from this.