‘He’ll get to vote’ – maybe
Polling place transfer provokes protests
A polling-access showdown unfolds in the Kansas town of Dodge City.
DODGE CITY, Kansas – A fresh “I voted” sticker gleaming on his leather jacket, Pedro Hernandez smiled shyly as his friends and neighbors steadily filed past into the cavernous polling site in this windswept former frontier town.
After decades as a documented resident of the USA, Hernandez, 53, voted Tuesday in his first election before starting his job at a slaughterhouse.
“It was easy,” he said speaking in Spanish through a translator. “It was my first time, and I was a little nervous, but I wanted to vote because now I’m a citizen.”
Activists warned for weeks that voters like Hernandez might struggle to vote in Dodge City after elections officials moved the city’s only polling location a mile outside the city boundary. Officials said road construction – which hasn’t started – prompted the move.
Hernandez tried to vote at the old location Tuesday morning but was intercepted by a small army of volunteers and voting-rights advocates who drove him and his wife to the new site. City and county officials provided buses from the old site, along with free doorto-door rides for workers.
“We’re getting this taken care of,” said Jose Vargas, 56, a longtime Dodge City resident who helped lead efforts to reach Hispanic voters and who voted early so he could dedicate Election Day to helping others. “He’ll get to vote.”
Along the streets of Dodge City and around the country, voting rights advocates said Republicans desperate to maintain power tried to depress turnout, especially among minorities who tend to vote for Democrats. President Donald Trump and other Republican officials said tough voting requirements are needed to ensure that only documented voters exercise that right.
In Ford County, Vargas said, the government fails to adequately consider the needs of Hispanics, who are 60 percent of the city’s residents. Vargas owns a company that helps Hispanic residents with their taxes and other paperwork. He said he believes the polling site move was done to disenfranchise his community.
“Dodge City is a prime example, but it is one of just hundreds or thousands of places that have these issues,” said Jessica Reeves, chief operating officer of Voto Latino, a national Hispanic-focused voting rights group. “This is happening all over the country, and unfortunately, nobody else is getting this kind of attention.”
By 2 p.m., Luis Saenz hadn’t voted. The 19-year-old had a farming job interview in the morning and hadn’t made time to go, he said. The polls in Kansas close at 7 p.m. local time.
“Honestly, I don’t know what the election is all about,” Saenz said. “Nobody has told me anything about anything.”
His comments drew a laugh from his aunt, Linda Tapia, 39, a documented resident who can’t vote. “Tell him to get out there,” she chided. “There’s no excuse.”
A U.S. citizen, Saenz said he recognizes that his vote and voice matter because they represent people such as his aunt, who cannot cast a ballot. Tapia’s sister, who is also a documented permanent resident, said Hispanic voters need to speak up for their community.
“A lot of Hispanic people don’t think like our president, and if Hispanic people voted, things could change,” said Jocelin Olivera, 38.
Election officials for Ford County said the new voting site better accommodated Dodge City’s approximately 13,000 voters, who began lining up at the cavernous Western State Bank Expo Center before dawn Tuesday.
Battles over voting access around the country were fiercest where Republicans and Democrats were locked in tight election battles, including in Kansas where the state’s top election official, Kris Kobach, ran for governor against Laura Kelly, a strong Democratic opponent. Kobach claimed there was widespread illegal voting by undocumented U.S. residents.
Voting rights advocates said tighter voter ID laws and other obstacles are the predictable fallout from a Supreme Court ruling in 2013 that stated the Justice Department no longer needed to sign off on voting changes in states with a history of discriminatory laws.
In Georgia, a judge blocked Republican-passed voter ID laws after concluding they overwhelmingly targeted the state’s Asian, black and Latino communities while leaving the white community largely unaffected.
In North Dakota, a judge allowed new Republican-passed voter ID laws that opponents said could prevent Native Americans living on reservations without street addresses from voting.
In Nevada, the Walker River Paiute tribe successfully sued the federal government because it didn’t have its own polling site on the reservation about 100 miles southeast of Reno.
In Dodge City, Sarah Heeke, 34, a lawyer, said she voted without a problem and didn’t anticipate anyone else having trouble. She said the media interest sparked an appropriate conversation about who votes. According to the Pew Center on the States, as many as 51 million Americans – 24 percent of us – are eligible but not even registered to vote. “I’m glad for the national attention. So much emphasis has been put on voting in Dodge City, and hopefully, it will ultimately increase voter turnout,” Heeke said, who brought her son, Bennett, 6, so he could see the process.
“It was my first time, and I was a little nervous, but I wanted to vote because now I’m a citizen.” Pedro Hernandez, 53