Imagine being in a city with 27,000 people—13,000 voters—and just one polling place. Imagine if you were one of the 60 percent of the people in the city who are Latino, and the only polling place was in a wealthy white neighborhood … and then it got moved to an even more difficult location, outside the city limits altogether and more than a mile from the closest bus stop. Insert your “get out of Dodge to vote” joke here, because that’s the situation in Dodge City, Kansas.
Dodge City’s Latino turnout is astonishingly low:
A Democratic Party database compiled from state voter data shows Hispanic turnout during non-presidential elections is just 17 percent compared to 61 percent turnout for white voters in Ford County in 2014.
Dodge City’s turnout is below the national turnout rate of 27 percent among Latino eligible voters in 2014, which in itself was a record low that year for the country, according to the Pew Research Center .
In a stark contrast with the 13,000 voters this one polling place outside the city limits is expected to service in a majority Latino city, the average Kansas polling site has 1,200 voters. City officials say it’s just the best they can do given Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and construction blocking the old, far from ideal polling place.
Whatever the specific excuses, this is an outcome of Republican voter suppression—a government that wanted people to vote would make it easier. And the fact that it’s happening in one of the few majority Latino cities in Kansas is no accident.
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