4.7% v 1.1%
The Voting Rights Act? What’s that? Never heard of it.
North Carolina Is Already Rejecting Black Voters’ Mail-In Ballots More Often Than White Voters’
In North Carolina, absentee ballots have already been sent back and the state has been updating statistics on those ballots daily. As of September 17, Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters, according to the state’s numbers.1 Black voters have mailed in 13,747 ballots, with 642 rejected, or 4.7 percent. White voters have cast 60,954 mail-in ballots, with 681 — or 1.1 percent — rejected.
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“When there’s a barrier, it’s going to fall hardest on the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the community, which is very frequently going to be poor voters and voters of color,” said Myrna Pérez, the director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mail-in voting has more barriers than in person voting – that’s why it’s annoyed me all along that Washington state went to all-mail-in voting. That is, in person voting has the barrier of physically getting to the voting place, but mail-in has several hoops to jump through in addition to filling in the little circles. There are more details it’s possible to overlook.
Here in Alabama¹, the Republican candidate for Senate went all fumblemouth when asked about the Voting Rights Act.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5f63c8b5c5b6c6317d019acc
He is running on a Trump coattails campaign, so it’s not terribly surprising he knows nothing about issues, but still.
¹ and yet he is holding a big fundraiser in Florida, where he lives. Go figure.
Just imagine what Trump would say if you asked him about the Voting Rights Act.
1 of 20 votes in some demographics trashed? It’s a good thing Trump hasn’t mentioned mail-in voting recently, so now we can rationally discuss the serious problems with it.
Keep your signatures 100% consistent, people! Or else some bureaucrat might throw your vote in the trash.
And if you’re voting for Biden, get your vote in now if you’re voting by mail, or drag your masked self to the polls and vote in person. The last thing we need is an apparent Trump victory on election night, followed by chaos when Biden takes the leader later.
I can tell you from experience, that can be very difficult (possibly impossible) if you have arthritis in your hands. Though I try to keep my signature consistent, it does wobble sometimes. And the group that is the most at risk from COVID is also the group most likely to have arthritis in their hands.
I am aware that the llikelihood that others at the polling place where I vote will be masked is low; maybe 1 in 3, or 1 in 4. I still intend to vote in person. Fortunately, I have never been in a line when I vote, and I haven’t heard that we have reduced our polling places. I guess in a white town, they don’t worry about that, but now that we are building a large Hispanic community, we might see that change. I personally miss the diversity of the large cities where I used to live, but people around here seem quite proud of being mostly white.