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Voter Suppression in Kentucky
Not Voter Suppression? Look at the Counties That Got More Than 1
Instead of the usual 3,500 polling places, Kentucky‘s 3,460,000 registered voters had to contend with a 95-percent reduction of locations to just 177. If apportioned evenly, this would have meant an average of 19,548 voters per location. With 538,023 registered voters, Jefferson County theoretically should have been eligible for 27 locations. Instead, the largest county in Kentucky and home to the most Democrats in any county, as well as half of the Black population in the entire state, got just one, as did Democrat-leaning Fayette County (202,639 registered voters), the second largest.
The distribution of polling locations was exceedingly uneven, with the two largest getting 1 each, but some smaller counties getting as many as 6. In total, just 24 counties benefitted from 69 polling locations, and 23 of those counties went for the incumbent senator in 2014. Ten had fewer than 20,000 registered voters in the entire county, and three of these counties — Carter (#38), Taylor (#45), and Lawrence (#72)— scored 4 polling locations each. The two smallest of the group , ranked 102nd and 106th in population, each got 2, making the voter-to-poll…
