Two weeks after Georgia's primary election debacle (or voter suppression success, depending how you look at it), Kentucky is up, and there are worrying signs. Interest in voting is clearly sky-high, with more than one in four registered voters in the state having requested absentee ballots and thousands having voted early. Those are good things—but the worry is about Tuesday, and how polling places will handle a possible rush of voters.
The number of polling places in the state has been drastically reduced, from 3,700 to fewer than 200. “It’s as if Kentucky failed to follow the crisis that unfolded in Wisconsin and Georgia, where officials were woefully unprepared for the turnout on Election Day,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Jefferson County, the state’s most populous county, will have just one polling location. And while Forward Kentucky explains why that's not as bad as it sounds—that one location is a huge convention center that will have 18 different lines and people to get voters into the right lines—it’s still worrying. For one thing, despite free shuttle service from downtown Louisville to the expo center, “This is a county that is 54 miles wide and has a sizable number of black voters and a very poor transportation system,” Clarke told The Washington Post. “It’s hard to imagine how voters across that county will be able to vote on Tuesday.”
Fayette County, the state’s second largest, will also have just one polling location, at the University of Kentucky’s football stadium. The county clerk there both expressed confidence in the preparations for large voter turnout and said “If we get a massive turnout at Kroger Field, that’s just going to be an angry mob.” So … qualified confidence.
Here’s hoping that mail-in voting and early voting avert the crisis of hours-long lines on Tuesday or people unable to vote at all. But in a democracy, we shouldn’t have to hope. Assuring voting access should be a primary function of a competent, well-funded government.