In a win for the little guys, a small predominantly black town in Georgia with fewer than 5,000 residents got election officials to acquiesce to their demand to reopen a polling location closed in one foul, disenfranchising swoop. A battle between Jeff Davis County election officials and Hazlehurst residents played out over the course of two years, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which helped lead the charge.
The community, which sits within a county branded with the name of former Confederacy president Jefferson Davis, is about 188 miles southeast of Atlanta and has a population that’s barely a sliver of the larger city’s roughly 490,000 residents. But although Hazlehurst didn’t have the numbers, it had more than enough will. When local residents and nonprofits banded together, they got the Jeff Davis County elections board to reverse its earlier decision to close a polling location affecting Hazlehurst residents, the law nonprofit reported.
Helen Allen, a 67-year-old resident of the community, told the Associated Press she’s been voting at the worn white building nestled between an office supply warehouse and a cemetery since she moved to the area in 1982. She said older residents and those with disabilities worried they wouldn’t be able to easily get to a new polling place across town. “We couldn’t understand or see why the poll was closed,” Allen told the AP.
The state of Georgia has seen hundreds of polling places closed since the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act five years ago, and a majority-minority county attracted national attention when it tried to close almost all of its polling places before Georgia’s November 2018 election, the law nonprofit reported.
In a news release, attorney John Powers of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law called the Jeff Davis polling place consolidation “poorly conceived.” He said the board’s decision to reverse the action “shows the power of resistance and the impact that we can have by leveraging our voices against injustice.”
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent a demand letter in May to the Jeff Davis County Board of Elections and Registrars urging the Board to reverse its decision. “Because Jeff Davis County kept nine voting precincts while consolidating down to four polling locations in 2017, we are concerned that the current plan violates O.C.G.A. § 21-2-265€,” Powers stated in the letter. “Counties may only establish a polling place outside of a precinct if there is no suitable location within the precinct and if the outside polling location ‘would better serve the needs of the voters.’ Both conditions must be met.”
That letter was signed on behalf of the New Georgia Project and the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda. Activists followed the letter with a petition drive, work with local and state election officials, and a local NAACP-led effort to get residents to demonstrate their opposition at Jeff Davis County board meetings.
“This is a victory for African American voters across Georgia who are too often subject to a relentless campaign of voter suppression,” Powers said in the news release. “The right to vote is the most sacred civil right in our democracy and we stand fully prepared to defend that right,” he added.
In a news release about the reversal, Phyllis Blake, president of the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, said that “as we approach the 2020 elections, the focus should be on improving access to the ballot for Georgia voters, not on closing polling places and placing unnecessary burdens on voters.”