MONITOR
Voting Rights Are Being Threatened More Than We Realize
How hand-marked paper ballots in Georgia can help reduce minority voter suppression
On the first day of the hearing in Curling v. Raffensperger, in the United States District Court of the Northern District of Georgia, state Rep. Jasmine Clark takes the witness stand. Clark testifies that during the July 2018 primary runoff election, poll workers at Lucky Shoals, a polling site in minority-majority Gwinnett County, tried to prevent her from voting because her name did not appear in the electronic polling book.
The plaintiffs in Curling, one of the most important election security cases in the country, contend that Georgia’s use of insufficiently secure DREs violates voters’ rights to due process under the 14th Amendment.
After calling a voter protection hotline for assistance, Clark, who is Black, was finally allowed to cast her ballot on one of the site’s touch screen direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. But the experience made her wonder how many other voters, especially minority voters, were turned away from polling places because of the state’s…
