Polling Place Closures in Medina and Galveston, Texas: Reprecincting without the Full Protection of the Voting Rights Act
Open AccessPolling place closures create an increased cost of finding a new polling place that causes would be voters to potentially abstain. Voting districts are often redrawn by officials who have partisan leanings and influence over the process. Because of this, it is possible to redraw districts in such a way to target members of the electorate that support another political party by using readily available demographic or voter registration data. Medina and Galveston Counties in Texas were examined due to their histories of voting rights abuses and recent polling place consolidation following the controversial Supreme Court case, Shelby v. Holder, which struck down the necessity of federal oversight in states with a history of voting rights abuses. In this thesis two multinomial logistic regression models were run to assess whether demographic data is correlated with whether the status of a polling place in a given census tract is altered. I find that it is more likely that polling places were closed in areas with higher Hispanic population compared to not changing, and that it was significantly less likely that polling places were opened in areas with higher Hispanic population.
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