A small Kansas town is caught in the middle of a political gunfight over moving its only polling station

It’s true that if Alejandro Rangel wants to vote on election day, he has to get out of Dodge.

But that is not the whole story.

Befitting its status as an iconic city of the American West with a reputation built around legendary outlaws and mythical lawmen, Dodge City is now caught in the middle of a political gunfight that has swiftly generated its own half-truths and spiraled into a national controversy.

The Democrats drew first, pointing out that the only place to vote in Dodge City on election day is being moved two and a half miles from the city center to an exhibition hall in what amounts to an urban wilderness. The move, they said, will further disenfranchise Latinos who make up a majority of the city’s residents but turn out to vote in very low numbers and have no one from their community elected to the city or county commissions.

Rangel, a high school student voting in his first election, said that casting a ballot on election day has never been easy in Dodge City, which has long had a single polling place for more than 13,000 registered voters, and now it will be harder. Both his parents, who were born in Mexico, work long shifts at the beef slaughterhouses that brought Latino migrants to the city and underpin its prosperity.

“My father waited up to two hours to vote in the last election because the lines were so long. Now they’ve moved it out of town, it’s out of the way. If you don’t have a car you have to get a bus.,” he said.

Rangel suspects the system is being manipulated to perpetuate the power of a shrinking white minority of Republicans in a city that is now 60% Latino with a rising number of Somali and Congolese immigrants.

“It’s either deliberate suppression or gross incompetence,” he said.

The polling station move drew national attention after the American Civil Liberties Union protested. Democrats framed it within President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, Republican moves to disenfranchise minority voters in other states and the raw politics of immigration in Kansas.

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Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state and Republican candidate for governor, has been accused of voter suppression after attempting to require voters to prove their US citizenship. Kobach, who headed Trump’s voter fraud commission, has made an issue of alleging that foreigners vote illegally even though there is no evidence it is even a minor problem in the state.

The ACLU said the law was based on “a xenophobic lie that non-citizens are engaged in rampant election fraud” . A federal judge blocked the move to require proof of citizenship in a ruling that was sharply critical of Kobach.

Kobach is in a tight race for governor and there is heightened suspicion of any move that might discourage opponents from voting against him.

All this has put the official responsible for moving the Dodge City polling station at the center of the storm. The Ford County clerk, Debbie Cox, an elected Republican, agreed to talk to the Guardian. Cox is stunned and disturbed by the criticism that has rained down on her.

“I’ve been accused of disenfranchising the voters, and against one party or another. This had nothing to do with party affiliation at all. Yes, I am a registered Republican but I don’t vote a straight ticket. That had nothing to do with the decision because everyone in Dodge City is going to have to go there to vote,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Debbie Cox, Ford County clerk at the center of racism accusations after she moved the only polling place in Dodge City, Kansas . Photograph: Handout

Long before Cox was elected, Dodge City consolidated voting into a single polling station at the civic center in the mid-1990s after a new federal law on access for people with disabilities meant that many existing places people went to vote could no longer be used. What was intended as a temporary measure became the norm.

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The civic center just happens to be in the heart of the white part of Dodge City and next to the country club and its golf course. A demographic map of the city shows it is largely segregated by a single road, Comanche Street. To the north are the white neighborhoods. South are almost entirely Latino.

Cox said that when she was notified of construction work between the civic center and its parking lot she decided to move the voting. She said she did not want thousands of people walking through or around the construction site.

“It could snow storm. There could be ice. That is a long ways to walk through with construction and ice. So my concern was the safety of the voters. Disenfranchising the voters was not my intent,” she said.

Cox said she chose the Expo site because it has large amounts of parking and can handle thousands of people. Although the new voting site is closer to mainly Latino neighbourhoods than white ones, it is still a drive or a 50-minute walk from downtown.

But there is a piece of the story missing from the national uproar.

While the only place to vote on election day itself is at the Expo center, there is a polling station in the heart of Dodge City at the county’s offices on Gunsmoke Street open weekdays for three weeks before the election. A steady stream of people makes it to the fourth floor of the converted hotel that serves as the county offices to cast their ballots. Cox says that around 150 to 200 people a day have been voting over the past week which she takes as a sign of a good turnout judged against typical elections in Dodge City. Almost half of those who will vote do so at the downtown location ahead of election day.

In truth, there are more options to vote in Dodge City than in many European countries. In Britain, there is a single day of voting, no early voting and limited voting by mail.

Still, that does not explain why Dodge City only has a single polling station on election day itself when neighbouring cities of similar population have a handful. As the ACLU pointed out to Cox, the average polling place in Kansas serves 1,200 voters. In Dodge City, it technically serves 13,000.

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By now, schools and other public buildings meet the legal requirements for disabled access and are typically used across the US as voting sites. The local schools superintendent even offered to make buildings available.

Cox said she has only been county clerk for three years and “is still getting her feet under the table”. But she offers a number of explanations. The first is that the traffic is awful near schools in the mornings.

“I feel like that would be more of a disservice to the voters because we have a lot coming in at 7am when the polls open, and for them to be tied up in traffic and to find a parking location at that time would be next to impossible,” she said.

Worse than having to wait in line for an hour or two to vote?

“The only time that I know of that the lines were that long was at the last presidential election, and that was towards the end of the day when people came at the same time. They can come anytime,” she said.

Cox is not persuaded by Rangel’s argument that his father works long shifts and has only limited time to vote.

“If they have a job that is shift work, that they are working 12 hours, I would suggest that they get their ballot by mail. I would suggest that they come up and vote in office on Saturday or anytime,” she said.

Johnny Dunlap, chair of the Ford County Democratic party, doesn’t buy any of this.

“None of her excuses hold water,” he said. “I don’t think it was necessarily malicious. I think it was a poor choice. Ill-advised. This is not convenient for anyone. It’s not part of the town. It’s absurd to move it out there.”

But then he reflected and said that it may be calculated after all.

“These are not stupid people. It’s either purposeful or callous. The outcome is voter suppression,” he said.

Cox fires back by sayingthe real racism lies with portraying Latino voters as incapable.

“I’m really starting to resent that they’re treating our Hispanic population like they they don’t know how to get to a place, that they don’t know where things are. The location that I have chosen is used for many many things and people get there,” she said.

The city responded quickly to the criticism by saying it would provide free bus rides to the polling station and by emphasizing the council has made efforts to help residents obtain citizenship and to promote cultural integration.

Rangel acknowledges that there is less friction than might be expected in a town that has seen relatively swift demographic change, although the Trump election campaign was testing.

“During the presidential election, there as a lot of tension in school. A lot of Hispanic students were angry that their white friends families voted for this man,” he said.

Rangel also said, that for all the issues around the polling station, there are deeper forces at work in discouraging voting. The real issue, he said, is less overt discrimination than marginalisation.

“There’s really no motivation to vote,” said Rangel. “I think the sentiment is my vote doesn’t matter and there’s no one to represent me. A lot of Hispanics are scared. They don’t want to put their voice out there. They don’t have anyone to speak for them.”