Thread by @JessicaHuseman

fun fact it is easier to vote in Texas than New York

https://twitter.com/oreuz/status/1307116462012862464

three weeks of early voting, which it’s had for a long time. Elections offices in Texas are also staffed by professional administrators, and in New York they are controlled by deeply problematic party officials. Until this year, NYC had no early voting.

In 2018 (and a whole bunch of other times) NYC removed thousands from the rolls for no real reason and was sued. Every county in NYC was under preclearance and if you want an example of why, look at where they put early voting locations.

Is Texas innocent of those things? Not really. But let’s not pretend voter suppression is isolated to the south.

Even if NYC’s issues can all be traced back to incompetence and carelessness and not racism (which, I’m not sure is totally true!) the impact is the same.

Thousands of New Yorkers are disenfranchised annually, you just don’t know about it Bc the national media thinks the south is where suppression happens when it is happening on their own backyard, it just doesn’t affect them.

As it happens I was routinely unable to vote in nyc Bc there was no early voting and you had to attest under penalty of perjury you wouldn’t be in the county on Election Day. Working sun up to sun down in my office in the county in which I lived was not enough.

Would my boss allow me to leave? Of course. But realistically I couldn’t spend 45 min transporting myself to Harlem, stand in line for another 45 and then come all the way back. There was too much to do.

I won’t have to do this in Texas, where voting starts in a couple of weeks and I can go anywhere at all in the county to cast my ballot.