Wages of Whiteness is very good, haven't read the others. Not a critical race theory expert but those both seem easy for non-academics (like me) to grasp. Funny to talk about this on the Pitt board "lol". Does Marcus Rediker post here? Some of his work is very close to this as well and I found it inspiring that Capel brought him along on the team trip to the DC museums.
Milwaukee Bucks Boycotting
- Thread starter TheSpecialSauce
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I'm not sure what anyone thinks is so effective about using basketball arenas as polling stations. I mean (to use a local example) if they were using the Pete as a polling place instead of Posvar Hall would it make any difference at all to anyone? If the Hill District voters had PPG Paints as their polling station rather than the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in the Hill would that actually make it easier for anyone?
The best polling places are the ones that are closest to the most people in the district, and that is very frequently NOT a sports arena.
Larger space that can reduce the amount of people standing in line outside in the elements (heat, rain, etc)
Anything that creates more space and reduced wait times in urban areas is fine with me
Some of these states have continually closed voting locations to cause those long lines. Don't relate it to your relatively easy experience voting in Pittsburgh.
What creates shorter waiting times is more machines. And where you are physically voting doesn't have anything to do with how many machines are at that polling station.
For instance where I vote they have three machines. The 2016 Presidential election was the first time that I ever had to wait more than five or ten minutes to vote, it took about 50 minutes iirc. But that was because they had three machines, not because they didn't have space for more. They easily could have had six machines there, or more if they wanted to, which would have meant significantly reduced waiting times. But of course someone has to pay for those three or four extra machines, and most of the time at most elections they would simply sit unused.
I have a hard time believing that most places that are polling stations couldn't handle more voting machines. The problem isn't that a place like the Ebeneezer Baptist Church is too small. it's that they don't have enough machines there. Move those people to PPG with the same number of machines and people will wait just as long to vote.
The part that I don't get is that (at least here in PGH) we have assigned polling sites, and mine is literally walking distance from my house. If my district told me even "we're moving these to the high school so that people can all wait and separate indoors," that would be much less convenient for me.
Is the rationale in places like Atlanta that public transit is actually constructed to make travel to an arena easier than random, small places like a church? Do they just close the local polling places? Or allow you to vote in more than one place?
2018 election, I voted early on a weekend and stood in line outside the building for almost an hour. I initiallly thought that the holdup was due to not enough voting machines, but to my surprise that wasn't the holdup. The bottleneck was the check in process. There were not enough laptops available to check in workers. Poll workers were sharing laptops to check in voters.
A bottleneck like that should be a simple fix, but I really think that the people in charge do as little as possible in order frustrate voters and thus suppress votes.
My own family member, a poll worker, has told me he's seen it first hand how they allocate resources to suppress voting.
2016 election, the same polling place had the same exact issue. Lines wrapped around the building. Anyone driving past and seeing that line would be discouraged to vote.
A bottleneck like that should be a simple fix, but I really think that the people in charge do as little as possible in order frustrate voters and thus suppress votes.
My own family member, a poll worker, has told me he's seen it first hand how they allocate resources to suppress voting.
2016 election, the same polling place had the same exact issue. Lines wrapped around the building. Anyone driving past and seeing that line would be discouraged to vote.
Yes, exactly. I could walk to my polling station. I don't, because I normally just stop there on the way home from work. But if they moved my polling station to the local high school or someplace else that is bigger, it just makes it less convenient for me and all the people who live in my ward to get there.
We don't need a larger, more centralized place to go and vote. We need more polling stations in the neighborhoods where the people actually live, and we need them to have enough machines to handle the anticipated level of participation.
This November, when you see places in Pittsburgh or Atlanta (that always seems to be a hot spot for long voting lines) or DC or any of these other big cities with huge voting lines, just remember which party it is that runs the counties and decides thing like that.
FYI....
The Elections Division of the Secretary of State’s Office organizes and oversees all election activity, including voter registration, municipal, state, county, and federal elections.
The people of GA are very familiar with which party controls the elections. The current governor oversaw his own election and didn't see it as a conflict of interest.
"Last year, Fulton County officials tried to close several polling places in predominantly black neighborhoods of South Atlanta, claiming they weren’t used enough to remain open. "
Remind us all, which party controls county government in Fulton County?
"When local officials attempt to close polling places in majority-black neighborhoods, as they tried in Randolph County, Georgia, they force black voters to travel farther to vote, Rutchick said, and to vote in an environment they may find threatening, like in a majority-white neighborhood. "
Remind us all, which party controls the county government in Randolph County?
"John Powers, an attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee, said that while decisions to close precincts are made by independent election boards in each of Georgia’s 159 counties, the trend is clear."
Georgia, like most states, leaves the number and placement of polling stations up to the counties. If the commissioners in Fulton County reduce the number of polling stations or don't have enough machines in place to handle the number of voters then the blame belongs squarely on their shoulders. I get that those folks, and their media apologists, would like to pretend that it's not their fault when they fail to do their job. But people shouldn't fall for the guilty trying to pass the buck onto someone else.
You can Google all the articles that'll fit your narrative, but I know exactly what I'm talking about.
I know, facts can be scary. That's OK.
I mean even one of the lawyers suing to keep polling places open says "decisions to close precincts are made by independent election boards in each of Georgia’s 159 counties ", but what would that guy know? Way less than you, obviously.
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