“It seems like they really don’t want us to vote this year,” she told me, and she was right. I was standing at a polling place in Texas on Election Day. Or, rather, standing at the church that had functioned as a polling place for a dozen elections. This time around, the polling location had been changed three weeks before the election. But no one had told the voters. At the old location, there was only one hidden, microscopic sign indicating the change. When we got there, people kept pulling up in cars, hoping to vote, and becoming very confused. We went to the CVS, got poster board and sharpies, and put up big signs directing people to their new polling place.
It turns out that when you want to stop people from voting, there are a lot of things you can do. A group from the HLS Democrats went down to Texas for the week before the election to do voter protection work, and what we saw shocked us. The voter ID regulations in Texas and elsewhere have gotten a lot of attention, but far less attention has been paid to the kinds of abuses we saw on the ground. Most of them, individually, could be chalked up to incompetence rather than malice. But when you think about the fact that we were called to polling locations reporting problems, and didn’t see a single white voter until the middle of the day, you start to realize that there is a comprehensive effort to deny blacks and Hispanics their right to vote.
One story is particularly cut and dry. One man told us that he and his wife moved 200 yards down the street. They updated their registration at the same time. She kept her old polling place, but his was changed. What’s the difference between the two of them? He is a registered Democrat while she is not.
Another polling place we were called to was an elementary school. No one from the board of elections had mentioned anything about voting logistics to the school administration until the day before the election. The polling hours were 7AM to 7PM, but the school closed at 5. By midday on Election Day when we showed up, there was no plan in place to keep the doors open from 5-7. In addition, the school was large and had many entrances; only one led to the polling place but there were no signs pointing out which one. Even if you did make it to the right door, you still had to be buzzed in to enter the school.
The last two hours of the day were the most horrifying. We were called to a community center that had been the early voting location for at least a dozen different minority precincts over the last few weeks. On the day of the election, however, it wasn’t a polling place at all. But the hundreds of voters showing up didn’t know that. Unlike the story I began with, this problem couldn’t be solved with signs because these voters were supposed to disperse to various voting sites across the city. Instead, we had to stand there and look up each person’s polling place individually as they drove in. At times people were arriving so quickly at the wrong place that it was quite difficult to keep up.
In the high-poverty neighborhoods of color we were mostly working in, turnout for a midterm election was always going to be low. But for many of the people who do want to vote, the smallest roadblocks can easily get in their way. We’re talking about the kind of communities where many people don’t have the state-recognized IDs that are now needed. A place where there are many former felons, barred for life from voting in many states. Things like switching the location of the polling place are extremely confusing and effective at depressing potential voters not likely to try to look up the answer on a smart phone. Or like holding an election in a giant supermarket, but failing to put up any indications letting people know where to go to vote when they get inside; we saw many people walk into the store, look confused, decide this must be the wrong place, and walk out.
When people realize that “the system” wants to prevent them from voting and to stop their voices from being heard, it is an extremely alienating experience. Not only is it bad for our democracy, but it is also bad for our society as it makes people feel like they are not welcome in places of power, that perhaps there’s no point in playing to win the American Dream if the system is rigged against them.
HLS Dems did a lot of great work down in Texas and helped hundreds of people vote, but there weren’t nearly enough of us to fix all of the voter suppression methods we saw. To fully protect the vote, we need far more lawyers and law students on the ground, watching for dirty tricks.