Dodge City, Kansas, made famous by the westerns, is now the site of especially blatant voter suppression tactics
Dodge City, Kansas, which has a 60 percent Hispanic population, had its only polling site moved outside the city limits to a suburban location with no access to public transportation, the Wichita Eagle reports.
Once famous as a boozy, violent frontier town of the Old West, Dodge City today is a community of 27,000 people roughly 160 miles west of Wichita. In recent years it has relied on a single polling site for its 13,000 voters, compared to an average of 1,200 voters at other sites. The polling site was located in a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood near a local country club.
This year, local officials have shuttered Dodge City’s lone polling place, citing road construction in the area, and moved it to a facility outside the city limits that is more than a mile from the nearest bus stop.
“It is shocking that we only have one polling place, but that is only kind of scratching the surface of the problem,” Ford County Democratic Party chair Johnny Dunlap told the Wichita newspaper. “On top of that, not only is it irrational and ridiculous that we have only one polling place, but Dodge City is one of the few minority-majority cities in the state.”
State voter data shows that Hispanic voters in Ford County had just a 17 percent turnout in the 2014 elections, compared to a 61 percent rate among white voters. The national Hispanic turnout rate in 2014 was 27 percent.