If you take a left out of the Blaine House and turn down State Street, you’ll drive past the Superior Court, the Lithgow Library and right through some of Augusta’s lowest income neighborhoods, including my own. A mile or so beyond that there’s a baseball field, a few local restaurants and the Augusta Food Bank. Then there’s a stretch around the corner headed out toward the interstate where you will find University of Maine Augusta and the Augusta Civic Center.
The Civic Center, the only Augusta polling location that will be open to in-person voting in July, is nearly four miles from the location where voters in Ward 1 usually vote.
This may not seem like a lot in a car, but on foot it is a big deal. And on foot with children, or for people dealing with mobility issues, impossible. There’s no sidewalk through that stretch of road. Cars move quickly around that corner and no matter where you walk you are in the hot sun.
Augusta City Councilors voted last week to close our usual ward voting locations and send all Augusta voters to that one spot. Unfortunately, this location is not easily accessible to Augusta’s poorest neighborhoods and will prevent low income voters from having their voices heard this primary election.
The decision to consolidate voting to one location was made largely because of a lack of poll workers, according to City Manager William Bridgeo, but the selected location is evidence that the transportation needs of low-wage earners in one of Maine’s poorest cities deserves more attention, and the voices of these voters remain essential.
Historically, poll workers tend to be older and thus more at risk of contracting COVID-19, so the pandemic is keeping them home this year. Mayor David Rollins has made it clear that consolidating voting locations is a temporary solution to the various struggles that a pandemic poses to an orderly and accessible election, but it only serves to further disenfranchise those voters who are also likely to be most impacted by the virus and its economic fallout.
This is not only happening in Augusta. Across the state, cities and towns are struggling to secure enough poll workers to maintain adequate in-person voting options for the July 14 primary. This week, Portland city officials rolled out a last-ditch effort to recruit more poll workers and may have gotten enough to ensure that most polling places will remain open.
In elections past there have been get-out-the-vote efforts that included free rides to the polls, but with the looming threat of COVID-19, these efforts have been waylaid for a push to vote-by-mail from many campaigns. This decision makes it even more important that Maine residents use the vote-by-mail options available to them and that municipalities have the support needed from staff and from the Mills administration to process those ballots.
As other states report upsetting evidence of voter suppression, it is especially important that we work to make it as easy as possible for all Maine residents to vote this election. If locations are chosen to centralize voting, those locations need to be accessible to all voters. The push for mail-in voting needs to be a priority in order to make this election smooth, fair and equitable.
Vote-by-mail ballots can be requested electronically and ballots will be mailed to voters in the weeks before the election. Though there is no cut-off for requesting a ballot, they do have to be returned to the town clerk by 8pm on election day, July 14.
Photo: Jimmy Emerson
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