Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
Oh, what the Supreme Court has wrought, in gutting the Voting Rights Act. Here it is, playing out in Georgia.
Louis Brooks, 87, has walked to cast a vote at his neighborhood polling place in Georgia's predominantly black Lincoln Park neighborhood for five decades. But not this year.
Brooks says he will not vote in the presidential election for the first time he can remember after local officials moved the polling station more than 2 miles (3 km) away as part of a plan to cut the number of voting sites in Upson County.
"I can't get there. I can't drive, and it's too far to walk," said Brooks, a black retired mill worker and long-time Democratic Party supporter. He said he does not know how to vote by mail and doesn't know anyone who can give him a ride.
A Reuters survey found local governments in nearly a dozen, mostly Republican-dominated counties in Georgia have adopted plans to reduce the number of voting stations, citing cost savings and efficiency.
Funny, that they just decided now that they had to economize by cutting voting stations. And funny, too, that they're cutting them in black precincts. Who'd have predicted. "The Nov. 8 election will be the first presidential contest since the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Georgia and all or parts of 14 other states with a history of racial discrimination no longer need federal approval for election law changes like polling place consolidations." Our old friend Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, weighs in and is shocked—shocked I tell you—that anyone might think it had anything to do with race. "It's election officials making adjustments based on the changing ways people are voting," he said.
It's not too late for Mr. Brooks to get an absentee ballot. The challenge for the Democratic Party, local campaigns, and the Clinton campaign is now to get to all these counties in the South and make sure one way or the other, folks get to vote.
For more on this week in the war on voting, head below the fold.