Early voting is already bringing the kind of pictures that have grown too familiar in recent election cycles: long, long lines of people waiting to vote, and especially Black people. Election officials in states like Georgia and Texas have specific, area by area explanations for why this is happening this time, but when it happens every time, those explanations look like what they are: excuses.
Yes, this election is seeing historic levels of early voting turnout as people’s eagerness to vote drew many out on the first day or days they had the opportunity to do so. That’s still not a reason for three or six or eight hour waits in line. We don’t need excuses. We need officials to fix this—but in states like Georgia and Texas, too often they are trying to make it worse.
It's the home stretch, and we need to put everything on the line. Sign up with 2020 Victory to make phone calls to battleground state voters for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Senate. Phone call times are flexible, and you can also sign up for a training session if you are new to doing it.
In Texas, for instance, it’s taking people longer to vote than it used to thanks to a new law banning straight-ticket voting. Instead of just marking “Democrat” or “Republican,” people now have to vote individually on what could be 20 or more races. Since Democrats tend to make more use of straight-ticket voting options, banning them is a move against Democratic voters by Texas lawmakers. When that law makes voting lines take longer, it’s not an innocent, unexpected side effect.
When people waited all day in Georgia voting lines, some argued it was just because it was the first day of early voting and lines would dramatically abate in the coming days. But though Tuesday was an improvement over Monday, wait times in some areas of the state were still three or six hours, and that’s still unacceptable.
Then there are the problems that always seem to crop up somewhere, like the “programming glitch” that knocked out machines at 30 Texas early voting sites for hours Tuesday morning. Georgia’s computerized voting system, which caused problems in the primary, “has been slow at times today, and for a period of time, it was down altogether,” a spokesman for Gwinnett County told The New York Times. In Virginia, the final day of voter registration was cut off when a fiber optic cable was “accidentally cut.” A federal judge did extend the registration deadline to Thursday.
But while there are going to be isolated problems in any large endeavor, voting in the United States has a far more serious problem: Republicans don’t want non-Republicans to vote, and they’re willing to make laws and allocate resources in line with that priority. That means long lines in places where Black people vote and nonexistent ones in places where wealthy white people vote. It means constantly changing laws that somehow always make it harder to vote.
The record-shatteringly high turnout in these early days of early voting in some states is a great thing. It shouldn’t come at such a high cost.