Poll Law Depresses North Carolina Black Vote Even After Suit
- Access fights have moved from courts to local level nationwide
- Obama says state law ‘one of the worst,’ and recalls 1960s
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Mazie Butler Ferguson, 72, remembers picking cotton for neighbors in 1964 so they could take time to study for a reading test they needed to pass before they could register to vote. This year, the Greensboro, North Carolina, resident found herself on a new front in the battle for ballot access.
Election officials in Guilford County, home to half a million people, opened a single polling site compared with 16 four years ago, with no weekend voting, except for the Sunday before Halloween. As a result, the number of ballots cast was down at one point by 90 percent compared with a similar moment in 2012.