Kentucky, which has had thousands of polling places in previous elections, has merely 170 open on Tuesday, including a single polling place for the state’s largest city: Louisville, which has more than 600,000 residents.
A federal judge in Kentucky ruled last week against plaintiffs, including a local Republican legislator and several voters, who claimed the drastic winnowing of polling places in the county’s most populous and diverse districts violated the First and 14th amendments, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Charles Booker, a Kentucky Democrat vying for the party’s nomination to compete in November’s Senate election, said Tuesday that restricting all of Jefferson County’s voters to a single polling place still amounts to voter suppression, even though the governor and secretary of state previously moved to expand vote-by-mail during the primary.
The Chenango County Board of Elections, which is led by a Democrat, dismissed a petition residents circulated that claimed going to a polling place full of sheriff’s deputies would intimidate voters.
Tuesday’s widespread restriction of polling places is in line with earlier Republican-led efforts to diminish in-person voter access.
