Voter Suppression Live Updates: Election Day Reports Pour In Early

UPDATED: 3:15 p.m. ET — 

Police in North Carolina arrested a man who showed up to a polling place in Charlotte while armed and wearing paramilitary gear. The unidentified man has reportedly accused of voter intimidation, something that can and many times does lead to voter suppression.

UPDATED: 11:12 a.m. ET — 

We can add South Carolina to the growing list of states accused of having at least one polling place limited to just one single working voting machine as lines steadily lengthened.

In one Georgia county, there were no working voting machines at all. Read more about that below.

UPDATED: 10:55 a.m. ET — 

Misleading political robocalls have been par for the course in the lead-up to Election Day, but they were reportedly continuing Tuesday in Flint, Michigan, a predominately Black city where citizens have been given false information about how and when to cast their ballots, according to Michigan’s attorney general.

UPDATED: 10:50 a.m. ET —

To be sure, the reports of voter suppression were far from one-sided. Multiple claims were being levied against Democrats, especially in Pennsylvania. The reports were purportedly substantiated by video evidence like these below instances in and near Philadelphia.

https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1323619425996722181?s=20

UPDATED: 10:37 a.m. ET —

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law announced Tuesday that it will be regularly providing updated data from its Election Protection Hotline to “give feedback from specific calls and data to discuss voter suppression, issues voters faced when casting their ballot and the legal strategies for response.”

The civil rights law group will likely be discussing situations like the reports out of Florida’s Miami-Dade County, where there was at least one report of voter suppression.

https://twitter.com/jcp717/status/1323635419540525057?s=20

UPDATED: 10:22 a.m. ET —

More reports of inoperable voting machines are coming in on Election Day. The latest report is from Texas, a crucial battleground state with a significant number of electoral college votes at stake.

According to Hank Gibson, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Texas’ First Congressional District, “not a single vote has been cast in the two hours the polls have been open” in his district of Upshur County “because NONE of their voting machines are working.”

UPDATED: 9:28 a.m. ET —

One polling place in Ohio reportedly is experiencing complete outages for “all” of its voting machines. A local journalist tweeted a photo from the First Baptist Church precinct in Bellbrook, a suburb of Dayton.

More than 64 miles away, “the Franklin County Board of Elections was not able to upload all early in-person voting data into their electronic check-in system,” according to a tweet from the office of Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. “Because of this, they are shifting to paper pollbooks to check-in voters today.”

LaRose insisted the developments “will not impact the security or accuracy of today’s vote” and “does NOT impact voting machines in any way.”

A similar situation was playing out in an entire county in Georgia in the metro Atlanta area.

Ohio, like Georgia, is widely regarded as an important swing state that is expected to help determine the election’s results.

UPDATED: 8:50 a.m. ET —

A county in the battleground swing state of Georgia reportedly didn’t have a single operating voting machine as polls opened on Election Day. Local news outlet CBS 46 reported Tuesday morning that “all voting machines are down” in Spalding County in the metro Atlanta area.

Georgia is a state that has traditionally been won by Republican candidates. It is also led by Gov. Brian Kemp, the former Georgia secretary of state who allegedly rigged his own election in 2018. Joe Biden and Donald Trump held multiple rallies across the state in an 11th-hour appeal to voters, underscoring the state’s importance to the election’s eventual winner. Spalding County’s population of more than 66,000 people is about 34 percent Black.

In Philadelphia, Marc Lamont Hill described his voting experience as a scene of utter confusion.

Original story:

Whether it’s through voting machines that were not operating correctly (read: broken) once polling places opened or if those polling places even opened at all, there was a growing sense that voters would be subjected to a range of voter suppression efforts as Election Day voting officially got underway.

Both of those scenarios and others were already playing out in parts of the country early Tuesday morning, according to tweets posted that claimed to document their adverse experiences at the polls.

https://twitter.com/horelick_m/status/1323611651111849984?s=20

Some polling places in New York City were reported as not opening on time as lines that began forming as early as 3 a.m. continued to get longer. While the reports were not immediately verified, they will probably foreshadow a steady stream of similar claims expected throughout Election Day across the U.S.

https://twitter.com/AmandaPresto/status/1323605022802878468?s=20

A similar scenario was allegedly playing out elsewhere Tuesday morning, as well.

While voter suppression has been a constant since before — and because — Black people were allowed to vote, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp seemingly fine-tuned the process against Stacey Abrams in the 2018 midterm elections. Now, the apparent powers have taken pages from both playbooks and ramped efforts in the hours before Election Day in Texas.

That’s where you’ll find Harris County, which is also the home of Houston, the state’s largest city with sizeable Black and Latino populations that reports say are united against Trump at the poll. That’s also where County Clerk Chris Hollins announced late Monday that his office was closing nine places where voters could drive-thru and cast their ballots, leaving just one single location to do so.

https://twitter.com/zoennah/status/1323613045818535936?s=20

By the way, Trump has been clinging to a slim polling lead over Biden in the battleground swing state that could determine the outcome of the election.

Coincidence?

https://twitter.com/brrdnrrd/status/1323592562951835648?s=20

The Texas Tribune reported that “Nearly 127,000” voters cast their ballots in the early voting period using the drive-thrus, a relatively modest number considering Harris County’s population of more than 4.7 million. But the point was clear — someone wasn’t playing fair during what has been widely described as the most consequential presidential election in modern history.

In anticipation of these suspected plots to keep voting levels down — a scenario that pollsters say would favor Trump — largely Democratic-friendly groups have launched pre-emptive strikes to stem the effects of voter suppression four years after Russia was accused of helping the president get elected.

For instance, more than 40 stadiums and arenas have been transformed into polling sites to combat voter suppression within communities of color, thanks to professional athletes and sports franchises stepping up to create safe spaces where individuals can exercise their right to vote.

There’s only one reason why such drastic steps would be taken in a country where voting is a right, Trevor Baldwin wrote last month: “there is such pervasive deficiency in our voting system one could make a legal argument of gross negligence.”

It’s a topic that our forever President Barack Obama was compelled to address after Trump appointed one of his cronies to oversee the United States Postal Service — an overt effort to affect the delivery of absentee ballots in time to be counted — when he should have been taking steps to confront the coronavirus pandemic.

“Everyone depends on the USPS. Seniors for their Social Security, veterans for their prescriptions, small businesses trying to keep their doors open,” Obama tweeted in August. “They can’t be collateral damage for an administration more concerned with suppressing the vote than suppressing a virus.”

Trump has all but admitted to his true intentions behind his USPS puppeteering and previously said he thinks mail voting could allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates like himself.

That prompted Obama to encourage people to vote early, a message clearly received as a record number of ballots were already cast before Election Day polling places officially opened Tuesday morning. And it sure seemed like the lion share of them were Black people.

That’s because polling by the Five Thirty Eight data analysis website shows that way more Black people were expected to vote early this year compared to 2016. That’s about 25 percentage points more than four years ago. The share of Black people who said they planned to vote by mail is also up significantly, the highest proportion among Black, white and Hispanic voters. Black people also led all voters who planned to cast their ballots in-person early voting numbers — 33 percent — which is an increase of 9 percentage points from 2016.

In addition, data show older Black voters made voting history well before Tuesday even got here. The reliable voting bloc has reportedly cast more early ballots than in the 2016 election — the most ever.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that voter suppression not only still exists but it is also apparently thriving.

With reports of voter suppression already on the books in the 2020 election, scroll down to see more examples of videos, memes, gifs and other social media posts reacting and related to all the efforts being taken to manipulate the democratic process that America loves to pride itself on.

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