A Maine city’s election shift led to ‘voter suppression’ charges from conservatives

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Voters in the southern Maine city of Sanford will converge on the high school this November, after a long-debated move to consolidate polling locations highlighted the broader polarization around the country over where, when and how citizens vote.

Leaders such as Mayor Becky Brink, a Republican , have defended the decision councilors finalized in early August to move from three polling locations to one at Sanford High School by saying it will limit confusion about where to vote on Nov. 5 and allow election workers and police to focus on one site. City Clerk Sue Cote first proposed the shift last summer.

Critics have fallen on the political right. Councilor Jonathan Martell called it “another round of voter suppression” ahead of a critical election. It is a side effect of how the major parties have divided on how they vote since a pandemic-era shift toward absentee ballots. In the 2022 election, nearly 125,000 Democrats requested absentee ballots. Only 60,000 Republicans did.

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Those opposed to the change argued it will make travel and waiting times longer. Research has found that while polling place consolidation can lower turnout among those who live farther away, boosted levels of early and absentee voting can offset the changes .

A Pew Research Center survey published in July revealed 6 in 10 Americans favor policies in Maine and more than two dozen other states that allow early or absentee voting without an excuse. While 82 percent of Democrats support that, only 37 percent of Republicans do. That was a sharp drop from 2018, when 57 percent of Republicans backed it.

Debates over voting access have heightened during that time, particularly because of former President Donald Trump’s false insistence of a “stolen” 2020 election . Several opponents in Sanford have used softer language than Martell, saying they are fine with one polling location but simply did not want the consolidation to happen before a presidential election.

“I don’t see this as a partisan issue,” Rep. Ann Fredericks, R-Sanford, who spoke against the shift, said in an interview. “I’m for absentee voting and early voting, but we’ve got to do everything possible to eliminate the concern that there’s interference with our voting system.”

The polling location debate played out for more than a year in the swing city of nearly 22,000 residents. It has three Republicans and one Democrat representing it in the Legislature, yet Democratic Gov. Janet Mills won it in 2022 over former Gov. Paul LePage, whose son-in-law, Sen. Matt Harrington of Sanford, is one of the Republicans representing it.

The latest registration data for Sanford indicated roughly 4,400 unenrolled voters, 4,000 Democrats and 3,700 Republicans. The city’s absentee voting patterns largely reflected the state in 2022, with nearly half of requested ballots in Sanford going to Democrats.

City Manager Steven Buck said Sanford is “taking extraordinary efforts” to inform voters of the change. Sanford’s website includes a banner that says voters will vote at the high school for the November election, with a voter information page featuring other reminders about voting.

Officials initially considered using either both the middle school and the high school or only one of them. The city’s three polling locations had been at a community center, the Sanford Christian Academy campus and Sanford High School. Sanford councilors voted 5-2 on Aug. 6 to use the high school gymnasium this November and beyond.

The high school, which will not hold classes on Nov. 5, will have 82 voting booths and 12 vote tabulating machines. It is accessible to people with disabilities, Buck said. York County’s transportation service will also offer free rides to voters who request them before Election Day.

Several residents at the Aug. 6 meeting said the city should wait until after the presidential election to implement the plan. But state Rep. Anne-Marie Mastraccio, D-Sanford, who is also a former city mayor, supported the consolidation during that meeting and called early and absentee voting “easier and just as safe a process as voting in person.”

Election officials “are often forced to make hard decisions about how to allocate their resources,” said Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow with the liberal Brennan Center for Justice .

“Consolidating polling places can be a good option, but it’s important that administrators take steps to make voting easy for residents,” Morris said. “Without a robust public education program, consolidating polling places runs the risk of inadvertently reducing turnout.”

Supporters of both parties nationally have made similar claims of “voter suppression” ahead of past elections that actually saw better-than-expected turnout, such as when national Democrats and figures including LeBron James criticized how Kentucky’s largest city of Louisville only had one polling site for the 2020 presidential primary.

Despite some heat, Sanford’s debate has been fairly civil while other election-related issues around the country have featured threats toward officials and criminal charges . Fredericks, the Republican lawmaker, said she hopes for less hostility and more “confidence in our democracy.”

“I like ketchup, and you like mustard. So be it,” she said. “We all see things from a different lens.”