Otter Globe and Intelligencer: “I’m sure that anyone who took the trouble to seek out this article is already aware that in the months following the 2020 Presidential election, Republican controlled state legislatures across the country began passing a dizzying array of laws designed to limit voter turnout in elections. The methods employed by these bills to limit access to voting are varied, but there is one theme that recurs in many of these laws: an effort to ‘weaponize voting lines’, by eliminating alternatives to voting on election day such as early voting, absentee ballots and the use of ballot drop boxes. Extended wait times to vote in majority-minority voting districts has been an on-going issue in former Confederate states such as Georgia for some time.”

“The situation is most glaring in major American cities such as Atlanta, where although the city’s population has increased by almost 2 million people since 2013, the number of polling places in the city’s greater metro area has been cut by 10%, with majority-Black city neighborhoods seeing the sharpest cuts. In this article I will enumerate the harms associated with extended wait times for voting, describe how vast disparities in wait times between polling locations within the same metro area constitute a violation of the 14th, 15th and 24th Amendments, and describe a five factor test for determining when there is potential for successful litigation.”