Protecting Your Vote: 1 in 5 Election Day polling places have closed over last decade

This story is part of ABC News' monthlong series "Protecting Your Vote," profiling people across the country who are dedicated to ensuring the integrity of the voting process.

Jesse Lee Hanson accepts some of the reasons why getting to his polling place on Election Day is a challenge.

He lives in a rural area of Georgia where homes are separated by acres of farmland, doesn't own a car, and walks with a cane after suffering two strokes and a heart attack -- all of which have made getting around difficult.

But Hanson says he struggles to understand why his home of Warren County, Georgia, decided to close five of their six polling places, forcing him to travel nearly triple the distance to cast his ballot.

"They didn't give us a reason or anything," Hanson told ABC News' Steve Osunsami. "I did have a little faith in politics, but I have no faith in politics now."

Like Hanson, millions of Americans have experienced changes in the way they vote, as local election officials in both rural and urban areas have closed thousands of Election Day voting sites.

More than one in five polling places have closed over the last decade, according to an ABC News and ABC Owned Stations analysis of data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, the Center for New Data and the Center for Public Integrity. Between 2012 and 2022, the United States lost 27,000 polling places, with the number of Election Day polling sites falling from an estimated 116,000 in 2012 to fewer than 89,000 in 2022.

The analysis found that polling place closures accelerated in 2013 after the Supreme Court rolled back key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the case Shelby County v. Holder, which made it easier for election officials to change polling locations without the oversight previously provided by the federal government in some states.

Activists and experts who spoke to ABC News said the decision allowed local governments in areas with a history of discriminatory voting practices to make changes that harmed Black and brown voters.

"Jurisdictions basically saw the floodgates open ... by passing new laws and procedures, even hours after that decision was issued, to change the voting rules," said Kareem Crayton, a vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank. "When polling places decline and when you have fewer access points to cast a ballot, what it means is that it's less likely that people in an average election ... show up."

'A very big deal'

Election officials say there are a variety of reasons why they decide to close polling places, including shifting voter preferences, budgetary changes, and accessibility concerns. Some states, largely in the West, lost most of their polling places as they transitioned to vote-by-mail. Others closed polling places when they consolidated neighborhood voting stations into more centralized countywide vote centers.

However, the ABC data analysis identified a dozen states that did not make major changes to their election procedures, yet still reduced the number of places to vote in person on Election Day. These include key swing states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Georgia, which alone lost 400 Election Day polling places since 2010.

In Hanson's home of Warren County, Georgia, five out of six polling places shuttered shortly after the Supreme Court reduced federal oversight of elections. The county, which is majority Black and low income, was left with a single voting location to cover nearly 300 square miles.

For Wanda Jenkins, a resident of Beall Springs, Georgia, the change meant she had to travel an additional seven miles by car compared to casting her ballot at her local fire station, where she served as a poll worker for over a decade before that site closed.

"It would've been better served in my community if it had stayed here," said Jenkins, who reminisced about welcoming hundreds of voters each Election Day. "It's a very big deal for regular voters."

When researchers examined the impact of polling station location on voter turnout, they found that when the distance to a voting place increases by a quarter of a mile, up to 5% of voters stop going to the polls. Additional research has demonstrated that lacking access to a personal vehicle is one of the largest drivers of inequality in voter participation.

Following the closures in Warren County, voter turnout fell from 40% in the 2010 midterm to 35% in the 2014 midterm. While turnout dropped across Georgia during that time, Warren County's falloff was larger than the statewide drop.

"I think it discouraged a lot of voters who may not ... have transportation," said Jenkins, who added she believed the county closed the polling place to disadvantage Black voters.

Warren County officials told ABC News that the closures were not targeted, and did not have an impact on turnout -- while claiming that the changes saved the county nearly $30,000 on printing costs alone during major elections.

Other battleground states have seen a disparity in the closing of polling places. In Wisconsin, where nearly eight in 10 residents are white, racially diverse communities in the Milwaukee area and in nearby Kenosha and Racine have seen major declines in the number of polling places. In Ohio, the counties with the largest declines have been among the poorest in the state -- both rural and urban.

In justifying reductions to the number of polling sites, election officials have pointed to reduced budgets, accessibility concerns, changing voter preferences, security issues and population changes, among other reasons.

"Against the history and the weight of the evidence that we have seen over the decades, unfortunately, jurisdictions use polling place closures to actually restrict the vote," said Leslie Proll, the senior director of the Voting Rights Program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

While the U.S. saw the gap in voter participation between whites and non-whites decline in the decades following the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, the gap widened for the first time in the decade following the Supreme Court's Shelby County decision in 2013, according to a 2024 Brennan Center report.

'No need for those many polling places'

In Lincoln County, Georgia, a fight over polling places has been brewing ahead of the upcoming election. A rural area, the county is bordered by a reservoir named after former Sen. Strom Thurmond, the most prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act.

After seeing counties like Warren successfully reduce their election sites, Lincoln County's elections director Lilvender Bolton said she decided to consolidate the county's seven polling locations two years ago. Bolton, who is Black, unsuccessfully attempted to close all but one polling place in 2022, and she ended up consolidating the seven polling places into three locations last year.

"I would have a staff sitting there all day, and one person come to vote," said Bolton, who explained the voting sites needed to be modernized. "It was just no need for those many polling places."

Bolton said her small elections office is better suited to manage the newly consolidated polling sites, which occupy modern and accessible new buildings, and that voters are still able to easily cast a ballot across the 260-square-mile county.

But when Lincoln County's plan to consolidate polling places made national news and prompted backlash from community members, Bolton said she was shocked and personally hurt by the response to what she says is a well-intentioned change.

"They were all just really mad because, 'Oh, you just don't want Black people to vote," said Bolton, who received a petition signed by hundreds of community members and was approached on the street by critics.

"All these news agencies, they were calling me," Bolton said. "We would talk, they would ask me what's going on, and then before the conversation ended they would say, 'Do you mind me asking you a question? And I was like, 'No.' And they said, 'Are you Black?' And when I told them that I was, they were surprised."

'Why disenfranchise anybody?'

Leading the charge against Lincoln County's polling place consolidation is Rev. Denise Freeman, a community activist who is now running as a Democrat to serve as chairman of the Board of Commissioners in the deep-red county.

After years of hard-won progress stemming from the civil rights movement, Freeman said the decision to close polling places was a step in the wrong direction, making it harder to vote for the county's people of color and poor residents.

The chairman of the Lincoln County Commission denied that the closures were targeted, and said the new polling sites were more accessible for voters.

"The thing about it is, why disenfranchise anybody? Why close any polls?" Freeman said. "If we should be doing things right, we would be making sure that every person has a right to vote."

While her opposition to the consolidation last year failed to stop the plan from taking effect, Freeman has vowed to restore the county's polling locations if she wins her election in less than two weeks.

"People don't understand the hardship that they put good people in when they make stupid and unnecessary changes in policy," she said.

ABC News' Hannah Prince contributed to this report.