NPR/Center for Public Integrity: A battleground fight over polling places and voting rights in Georgia

NPR/Center for Public Integrity: A battleground fight over polling places and voting rights in Georgia

Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, told the Augusta Chronicle in December that the county was "trying to do this undercover precinct consolidation" and several voting groups would begin a canvassing drive to stop the plan. "I think there are bad actors who are wanting to pilot precinct consolidations and takeovers of elections boards in smaller counties," she said.

As a half-dozen voting rights advocates filed into the Lincoln County Board of Elections to deliver a petition that temporarily halted plans to shutter polling places, the tension between them and elections director Lilvender Bolton was nearly palpable.

After spending the afternoon anxiously watching the front door for the petitions she knew were coming, going over the events that had brought national scrutiny to the question of voter access in her rural east Georgia county, Bolton gave a defiant stare as she took the thick stack of papers into her tiny office, ending the awkward handoff.

Back outside, gazing at a bank of cameras and reporters, Denise Freeman, a Lincoln County resident rallying opposition to the plan, let out a deep sigh.

“It is unconscionable that we would even have anyone to think about closing precincts in 2022,” said Freeman, a Black pastor and former school board member. “It takes us back to an era that we thought that we would never have to go back to.” …

In December, a plan to approve the consolidation was delayed for lack of a quorum. Media attention ramped up from there.

Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, told the Augusta Chronicle in December that the county was “trying to do this undercover precinct consolidation” and several voting groups would begin a canvassing drive to stop the plan.

“I think there are bad actors who are wanting to pilot precinct consolidations and takeovers of elections boards in smaller counties,” she said.

But Bolton, the elections director, said the voting rights groups never asked to speak with her or offered alternative solutions to the problems she was aiming to fix. She said she wished they’d come “to talk to me to see what I was doing, what was going on.”