It took two years but the unified, grassroots efforts of one predominantly Black community in a rural Georgia county caused an elections board to reopen a polling site that officials shut down in 2017.
Black residents of Hazlehurst, Georgia realized that under a Trump presidency, they couldn’t count on the federal government to intervene when the polling site was closed in 2017, so they mobilized and circulated petitions to the Jeff Davis County elections board while advocacy groups threatened lawsuits and packed election board meetings. In the end, the effort paid off, according to NBC News.
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Eventually, the Jeff Davis County elections board reconsidered and reopened the site that is used by most of the Black residents in Hazlehurst, a town located roughly an hour and a half’s drive from Savannah. Many of these residents say they have voted at the polling site for years and couldn’t understand when it closed two years ago and they were reassigned to another polling site that wasn’t as close by during the heat of the hotly contested Georgia gubernatorial contest.
“We couldn’t understand or see why the poll was closed,” Helen Allen told NBC News.
Allen, who is 67, told the station that she had voted at the station for nearly 40 years and that elderly residents, like herself, were concerned that they would no longer be able to get to the new polling site.
Allen said residents talked “about the hardship and how they didn’t want to go all the way across town,” she told NBC.
What happened in Hazlehurst is what has happened, and is happening, at hundreds of polling sites in Black communities across the country. What is unique is the mobilization of advocacy groups and residents that all but forced the elections board’s hand.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia and other states didn’t have to abide by the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s condition that before they shutter a polling site, they had to demonstrate to the federal government that the change wasn’t discriminatory in nature.
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Julie Houk, managing counsel for election protection for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said when election boards shutter polling sites in disadvantaged communities, it essentially creates a barrier to voting.
“We’ve seen that happen in Georgia time and time again where it’s the minority voter community who are more disadvantaged by these poll closures than anyone else, and that raises serious concerns,” Houk told NBC.