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US: Ensure Equitable Voting Access in Georgia Runoffs
Many Counties with High Covid-19 Rates Have Only 1 Drop Box
Thursday 03 December 2020
(Washington, DC, December 3, 2020) -- State and local election officials in Georgia should take immediate steps to ensure that every voter in the state has easy and equitable access to absentee ballot drop boxes in the lead up to the January 5, 2021 Senate runoff elections, Human Rights Watch said today as it released a new data analysis of the issue.
Human Rights Watch determined that there are significant inequities between voters’ access to drop boxes by looking at the number of drop boxes per eligible voter in each of Georgia’s 159 counties, the number of drop boxes per square mile in each county, and the 14-day new Covid-19 case rate in each county.
The analysis is based on a list of locations for ballot drop boxes compiled by the non-governmental organization All Voting is Local and other groups. Human Rights Watch supports these groups’ request to state and county officials to install more absentee ballot drop boxes, specifically one box per 15,000 eligible voters, ahead of the January 5 election.
Data sources:
Dropbox data: “List of Ballot Drop Box Addresses,” All Voting is Local - Georgia, November 30, 2020, (collected via telephone and email contacts with officials in each of Georgia’s 159 counties) (data on file with Human Rights Watch).
Population data: US Census Bureau, “American Community Survey 5-Year Data (2014–2018),” 2019, https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-5year.html (accessed December 1, 2020).
Eligible voter population: Calculated by Human Rights Watch. Includes all citizens age 18 and older.
14-day Covid-19 case data: “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Data in the United States,” The New York Times, https://github.com/nytimes/COVID-19-data (accessed December 1, 2020) (data through November 30, 2020).
Land area, square miles: Calculated by Human Rights Watch from US Department of Agriculture, “Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes,” 2019, https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-commuting-area-codes/ (accessed December 1, 2020).
