Debbie Cox, the county clerk who decided to move the one and only polling location in predominantly Latino Dodge City, Kansas, outside of the city limits, says she did so because of safety concerns. Due to construction, there would be 450 parking spaces rather than 519 at the city’s longtime polling place. That is an entire 69 fewer parking spaces, and while there was extra parking at a nearby church, Cox didn’t want people to have to walk that far. So she moved voting out of the city entirely, to a place where, the Wichita Eagle reports, “there is no bus route, or sidewalk, to the location. To get there on foot from town, you must cross a state highway.”
Gosh, that sounds much safer. And this is the arrangement for a place where 13,000—as opposed to the Kansas average of 1,200—voters will be sent in one of the few majority Latino cities in Kansas, while white cities in the same county have more places to vote. The very same Debbie Cox who thought that crossing a state highway was safer than walking from a neighboring parking lot had this comment when she got an ACLU letter asking her to help promote an election protection hotline:
“This is what I got today in the mail from ACLU. LOL,” Cox wrote in a message she sent to Bryan Caskey, state director of elections.
Cox said she didn’t mean anything by the “LOL.”
“It’s just kind of like, ‘OK, here we go again,’” Cox said.
Here we go again with what? Does that thought accurately expand to “It’s just kind of like, ‘OK, here we go again with these people thinking I’m going to promote information about voting rights, seriously, what are they thinking?’”
Dodge City is offering free rides to vote on Election Day, to make up for this county-level voter suppression effort.
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