Mark Nichols

USA TODAY

Election officials across the country have closed thousands of polling places and reduced the number of workers staffing them in recent years, citing cost savings and other new realities like increased early and absentee balloting.

However, days from what many expect will be one of the busiest midterm elections in decades, the burden of Americans’ shrinking access to in-person voting options is falling more heavily on urban areas and minority voters, a USA TODAY analysis of national and state data shows.

Voting rights advocates say the disappearance of polling sites could create confusion about where to vote, and thinner staffing of remaining sites could mean longer lines.

Those problems, they fear, could shrink voter turnout in some neighborhoods.

“Any time you create additional hoops that voters have to jump through, it hurts – particularly when it affects the poorest, most at-risk, and vulnerable citizens,” said John Powers, counsel for the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington.

Counties with larger minority populations – most of them the urban centers of large metropolitan areas – were left with fewer polling sites and poll workers per active voter, according to an analysis that included data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey and the U.S. Census Bureau as well as local and state voting agencies.

Interactive Map: Explore closed polling places differences by county

In majority-minority urban counties, voters lost an average of seven polling places and more than 200 of the workers who help them cast ballots between 2012 and 2016.

And, the dearth of places to vote was far worse in some big cities. Election administrators in Chicago’s Cook County closed or moved 95 polling places; Los Angeles County closed 88 sites, and Houston’s Harris County eliminated 27.

By contrast, in more than 1,000 counties where 90% or more of the population is white, voters in 2016 lost two polling locations and two workers on average.

The number of voting sites has continued to shrink in 2018, according to election officials, voting rights experts and the publicly-available lists of polling sites for next month’s midterms.

Among the reasons: budget cuts, the struggle to recruit poll workers and shrinking availability of suitable sites to host Election Day voters.

Some states are moving toward consolidated “voting centers” that serve larger numbers of people, but may be spaced further apart – a shift from an era of smaller, nearby local polling places.

The impact of the disappearing and merging voting locations is more likely to challenge voters in urban counties, where more people are poor and are less likely to have vehicles to get themselves to a polling place outside their neighborhood on Election Day.

Toll of poll closings

Whether they drive dusty country roads or walk city blocks to a church or school on Election Day, USA TODAY found non-white voters, in particular, are feeling more of the sting of polling place losses.

In Jefferson Parish, La., where the non-white population is 47%, the USA TODAY analysis shows election officials shut down 23 polling locations before the 2016 election – the most of any Louisiana parish. That forced voters to be reassigned to other polling places.

Jefferson Parish officials said they closed all but two of the 23 sites because owners could not afford to make them accessible to voters with disabilities.

More:Midterms: How can election groups get out the vote when just half of Americans say process is 'fair and open'?

For next month’s election, just one additional polling place has changed since 2016. A nursing home has decided not to host, forcing its residents and others who voted there to cast ballots at a gymnasium about two miles away.

Brian Freese, the parish elections supervisor, admits moving the venue might be less convenient for older or handicapped residents who live there. But he believes many of the nearly 500 people who voted at the home will take advantage of early voting instead.

In Maricopa County, Ariz., election officials decided to save money by closing 140 polling locations before the 2016 election. The result: confusion, long lines and frustrated voters at sites across Phoenix – the state’s capital and a majority-minority city. The county also lost about 270 poll workers.

An analysis by The Arizona Republic after the election, found that both rich and poor areas in Maricopa County were left underserved by the lack of polling sites, but the review found polling places were particularly sparse in poorer areas such as west Phoenix and Glendale.

The U.S. Department of Justice, at the request of city officials, is investigating to determine if the county violated voting rights laws. A draft of a report commissioned by the county blamed the long lines on polling place closures driven by budget concerns.

More:Report questions what caused long lines at Arizona polls in 2016 election

More:Who is to blame for election day problems in Arizona?

In Manchester, Conn., residents in the heavily-minority Spruce Street neighborhood are fighting to resurrect a voting hub at the former Nathan Hale School, which was closed in 2012.

About 43% of the Hartford County town’s 58,000 residents are minorities. Town leaders moved the polling location to Highland Park School, about three miles away, which now has about 5,000 registered voters – nearly twice the size of the average crowd at a county polling site, records show.

Democrats say the changes disenfranchised residents in the neighborhood, in part because many lack transportation and Highland Park has no bus line nearby.

State law prohibits moving a polling site between elections in the same year, but Manchester’s board of directors is considering moving the poll site back to Nathan Hale in 2019.

But on Nov. 6, Spruce Street residents will be forced again to get to Highland Park to vote.

Behind the closures

Like New Orleans and Phoenix, local administrators say some loss of election-day sites and workers is a response to state budget cuts.

Thousands of sites were closed because they don’t comply with the American Disabilities Act, and neither hosts nor local governments have the money or incentive to renovate them.

Other closures can be tied to early voting and alternative voting initiatives in some states. More people voting before Election Day means fewer sites and workers are needed.

For instance, USA TODAY ignored Colorado, Oregon and Washington in its analysis because they developed mail-in voting initiatives in recent years, decreasing demand for in-person voting.

In some states, officials moved polls out of schools because of security concerns.

Whatever the stated reasons, many closures have taken on political or discriminatory overtones.

A 2016 study by The Leadership Conference Education Fund, a Washington-based voting rights group, found at least 868 polling places were closed in seven Southern and Western states once scrutinized under the Voting Rights Act.

Part of the Act struck down in a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision forced election officials in areas with a history of documented voter discrimination to publicly disclose poll closing plans and prove to federal officials the closures would not discriminate against voters of color.

In Georgia, election officials in rural, largely black Randolph County tried to close seven of nine voting locations. The proposal drew national attention before it was nixed in August. Officials said the closures would save money, and locations did not meet federal disability requirements. Activists and several state lawmakers saw an attempt to suppress black voter turnout.

In Ford County, Kansas, election officials are scrambling to ensure that more than 13,000 voters in Dodge City, a majority Hispanic city, know where to vote Nov. 6, and have transportation to get there. The county election board closed the city’s only polling place – a civic center in a mostly white neighborhood – and moved it to an Expo Center outside the city – more than a mile from the nearest bus line. Officials said they moved the voting site because of road construction, but they sent newly registered voters notices directing them to vote at the old location.

In Indiana, the Secretary of State’s office announced in July it was closing 170 Democrat-dominated precincts in Lake County – home to the state’s largest Latino and second-largest black communities in cities such as Gary and East Chicago. The state said the closures, beginning in 2019, would leave polling places close to public transportation. Democrats said it keeps black and Hispanic voters from the polls.

Election administrators coping with budget issues have to realize their decisions impact people, said Myrna Perez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and law institute that focuses on voting rights and other social issues.

“You’re not off the hook if the burden is not being shared by everyone.”

Numbers can’t show the real-life impact of closures, mergers and fewer poll workers.

A 2011 study by the American Political Science Review found that consolidating polling places in Los Angeles led to increased transportation costs for residents in some neighborhoods – and lower turnout.

Longer lines, created in part by closing sites and understaffing those that remain, can “undermine the voting experience,” according to a report released in April by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank.

Powers, the Voting Rights Project counsel, said local election officials are sometimes unable – or unwilling – to adequately staff a venue that has absorbed more voters.

“If three locations with nine total workers are merged into one, you may not see all those workers at the one (merged) site” he said. “But you still have more voters, so there are longer lines, and sometimes, more issues.”

Some election officials are trying creative solutions.

Election boards in Arizona and Texas have tried to take the sting out of closing hundreds of polling places since the 2013 Supreme Court decision by initiating “super-precinct” systems. Voters from anywhere in a county can cast ballots at any voting sites

“When it’s done right, the voter flexibility you get can be a really good thing,” said Perez, the Brennan Center deputy director.

Keeping voters in the neighborhood

But some still believe there’s nothing like a polling place in your own neighborhood.

On Nov. 6, Leonard “Lee” White will again transform Hair Culture, his barbershop in North Philadelphia, into a polling station – moving barber chairs into a back area, and setting up booths and tables for voters in the front.

Hair Culture is one of at least a dozen barber shops, funeral homes and even private residences in Philadelphia County – and hundreds nationwide – that have replaced aging or closed-down schools, churches and community centers as voting sites.

Powers, the voting rights advocate, sees these small businesses and homes as gap fillers in neighborhoods where voters want to cast ballots at a poll site on Election Day.

“People, generally, like the idea of voting in-person…they feel more assured their vote will be counted,” he said. “And in communities of color, the right to vote in-person, at a voting booth, has been long fought for.”

White has hosted a voting site in the mostly black precinct since 2013, when county election officials were forced to move Ward 50, Division 13 out of a nearby church that could not accommodate disabled people. The civic generosity of White, a self-described “bootleg activist,” kept the polling place from moving out of the neighborhood.

“I just see this as an opportunity to continue the message that voting is important,” he said. “People in this neighborhood need to know their vote counts.”

While there’s easy entry through the front door, no stairs and open space to set up ballot boxes, White knows that Hair Culture is hardly a perfect venue.

There’s no parking lot for the row of walk-in businesses along Ogontz Avenue, so driving there can be tricky – particularly in the mornings and around lunch, when many of the precinct’s nearly 600 voters arrive. A McDonald’s restaurant on the corner lets voters park in its lot.

None of that seems to discourage voters. About a quarter of them voted in the May primary – higher than the city’s anemic 17% turnout.

Every vote in the precinct was cast in person – at the barbershop.