One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

Other ploys to strip election resources from minority communities abound. By the time the 2016 election was held, for example, there were 868 fewer polling places available in previous VRA preclearance counties.100 Scholars have found that “moving a polling place can affect”—and not for the better—“the decision to vote.”101 North Carolina, in a “subtler maneuver” than the gerrymandering and voter ID laws that landed the state in court, “moved the location of almost one-third of the state’s early voting sites,” which then “significantly increased the distance African Americans have to travel to vote early, while leaving white voters largely unaffected.” This was deliberate. An earlier study indicated that for every one-tenth of a mile increase to a polling place, voting by registered black voters declines by 0.5 percent. The ratio in that study suggests that “North Carolina’s changes might have kept nearly 19,000 black voters from the polls.”