Today, about 30,000 people live in the town of Dodge City, Kansas, the one-time outlaw gunfightin' capital of the world whose name is universal shorthand for the imperative to leave a dangerous place quickly. Most of those residents—about 60 percent—are Hispanic, and in what is almost surely a wild coincidence, the county clerk has moved the town's lone polling place to a site that is both outside city limits and about a mile from the nearest bus stop. In order to participate in democracy in 2018, Dodge City residents will literally have to get the hell out of Dodge.

The proffered reason for this shift is road construction that apparently blocks access to the most recently-used location, which has been in use since 2002. That is the year in which officials, citing to requirements imposed by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 2002, closed all but one of the town's polling places; as the Wichita Eagle notes, that location is nestled comfortably in the whiter, wealthier part of this majority-minority town, "just blocks from the local country club." In 2014, according to data collected by the Democratic Party, white voter turnout in Ford County was around 61 percent; Hispanic turnout was 17 percent. Again, these are wild coincidences. From the Eagle:

Kansas is not the only state that has closed polling sites. Polling places across the country have also been shuttered since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act. A 2016 research report from the civil rights coalition Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found local officials had shuttered 868 polling places in the three years after the court’s ruling.

A decade ago—even five years ago—stunts like this one might have gone unaddressed. But this year, activists got creative. Voto Latino, an organization that sprang from a 2004 public service announcement campaign headlined by actress Rosario Dawson, began reaching out to its corporate partners upon hearing the news. Now, on Election Day, it will be offering free rides to the polls, courtesy of the unlikely coalition of Lyft, Steve Madden, Johnnie Walker, and donors like you. The state Democratic party has also launched a special volunteer and fundraising drive to ensure that no one in Dodge City doesn't vote because they don't have a way to get there.

The notion that self-determination in this country depends in any part on the largesse of a ridesharing app, a shoe company, and an alcoholic beverages manufacturer is, admittedly, a grim one. (This is especially true when elected officials and Supreme Court justices, the people who should be upholding voting rights, have demonstrated little interest in doing so.) And the frustrating reality that progressives keep having to spend their time and money and energy fighting this bullshit is exactly why the Republican Party has adopted minority voter suppression as a semi-official plank of its platform: As a political strategy, it is as savvy as it is despicable.