Trump Administration Is Using Federal Disability Law To Disenfranchise Minority Voters
Source: Think Progress
By Kira Lerner, Aug. 22, 2018, 10:27 am.
Randolph County, Georgia is the latest place where officials are using the Americans with Disabilities Act to suppress votes.
A majority-black county in rural Georgia announced a plan last week to close seven of its nine polling places ahead of the November election, claiming the polls cannot continue to operate because they are not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The move sparked instant opposition from voting rights advocates, who have threatened legal action if Randolph County follows though with the plan. Activists are also scrambling to collect enough signatures to stop the effort before Friday, when the election board will make a final determination.
The racial implications of the closures have generated significant attention. The county is over 61 percent black, and one of the polling locations that would be shuttered serves a precinct where more than 95 percent of voters are African American. Had the U.S. Supreme Court not gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the closures would most likely have been blocked by the Department of Justice.
But the method the county is using to justify the closures has generated less attention. Republican lawmakers and election administrators in Randolph County are not the first to use the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), intended to protect the nation’s disabled communities, as a pretext to disenfranchise minority voters...More...
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/ada-voter-suppression-cd7031080bfd/
Jim Tucker, an attorney and member of the Native American Voting Rights Coalition, said he learned earlier this year that the DOJ’s Disability Rights Section is targeting at least 3 largely Native American counties, where facilities used as polling locations often lack paved parking lots, designated handicapped parking spots, entrance ramps, wide doorways, and other ADA-required features.
The Justice Department has threatened enforcement actions in several counties if local governments do not either spend large sums of money to modernize polling locations or close them altogether. “It’s a diabolical move: citing one civil rights statute (the ADA) as the justification for violating another (the VRA),” Tucker, who previously worked in the DOJ’s Voting Section. “These sorts of closures can effectively disenfranchise entire communities of voters, all under the false guise of purportedly seeking to make polling places accessible for the disabled.”
The areas the Justice Department has targeted point to the larger goal of suppressing non-white voters. Since Trump, the department has settled at least 5 enforcement actions in counties where polling locations do not meet the stringent requirements of the ADA. Four of the five counties have significant minority populations:
A person votes in the handicapped assisted booth at Bishop Leo E. O'Neil Youth Center November 4, 2014 in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Photo of one polling location that is not ADA compliant. Credit: ACLU of Georgia.
= new reply since forum marked as read
were good enough for everyone this spring when the GOP had primary and run-off elections there. That's right, these same polling places were used by Republicans a few months ago, but they've mysteriously become "non-compliant" since then.
I call bullshit. Not only bullshit, but BIGLY bullshit! 
