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Thoughts on Voter Suppression — In All of Its Forms
I am thinking of the day it took me five hours to vote.
It was November 6, 2012.
Five hours with no food or water. I have the great privilege of running my own business and thus being able to vote at times I know are quiet. Usually 10am is it.
Not that day.
But I also had another privilege. At about 2:30pm a truck showed up with boxes of paper ballots, supplementing the insufficient number of voting machines. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons Virginia stopped using voting machines).
The line sped up, I voted and got out of there.
Then I found out what did not happen in a good number of other precincts.
That would be the arrival of the truck full of boxes of paper ballots.
And I’m going to say it out loud.
My precinct is mostly white. The ones where they left people in line until well into the night were…yup. Yes. Where the brown people live.
My state practiced voter suppression and many people didn’t notice.
I noticed.
I noticed and I spoke out.
Not providing enough ballots/machines in minority precincts is voter suppression.