Voting site reopened in Ga. after fight

HAZLEHURST, Ga. — When local election officials shut down a polling site in a predominantly black area of a rural Georgia county, displaced voters couldn’t look to the federal government to intervene as it once did in areas with a history of racial disenfranchisement.

So residents banded together, circulating petitions pressuring the Jeff Davis County elections board to reconsider, while advocacy groups sent pre-lawsuit demands and organized turnout at board meetings. The grassroots struggle took two years, but county officials finally relented and agreed to reopen the polling site.

With hundreds of voting sites closing or consolidating nationwide, the victory in Jeff Davis stands out as a rare expansion of in-person voting access since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that freed Georgia and other states from the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s requirement to prove to the federal government that voting changes won’t be discriminatory.

Most of the African-American residents of Hazlehurst, about 100 miles west of Savannah amid pine forests and cotton fields, have voted at the polling site for years and were surprised when it was shuttered in August 2017. They were reassigned to a new, consolidated poll site across town just as the Georgia governor’s race was beginning to heat up.

“We couldn’t understand or see why the poll was closed,” Helen Allen said in a recent interview.

The 67-year-old had been voting at the little white clapboard building in a dirt lot between a cemetery and an office supply warehouse since she moved just down the road in 1982.

She said some older and disabled residents became concerned about how they’d get to the new polling place. Residents began “talking about the hardship and how they didn’t want to go all the way across town,” Allen said.

Julie Houk, managing counsel for election protection for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said polling site closures can create tremendous barriers for voters, especially those with low incomes or no personal vehicle, and they are too often carried out in minority communities.