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I worked the polls on Chicago's south side yesterday. Here's a thread of the voter suppression I encountered.
Two precincts were shoved into a room barely big enough to hold one. Social distancing was made impossible. People were shoulder to shoulder while voting, putting everyone at risk of covid.
Because we had no space and TWO precincts, any time there was anyone in line to vote it would spill out onto the street. This made it look like the line was longer than it was, and discouraged people from coming to vote.
The city didn't give us hardly any PPE supplies. We were working with maybe enough wipes to clean booths every hour. Most of us were using makeshift wipes from hand sanitizer and paper towels we found in the bathroom.
We didn't receive the right pens to vote with. They gave us sharpie markers, which bled right thru ballots and spoiled them. We had people redoing ballots left and right, and holding up the line because the city gave us the wrong supplies.
Polls closed so early that people couldn't make it home from work in time to vote in their precincts. And when they needed to vote in the wrong precinct, their ballot was provisional and won't count for another two weeks.
People were coming to us saying they were turned away at other polling places because they had recently moved. IL has same-day registration. You should never have to vote in the precinct where you -used- to live. People were getting on buses to come where they didn't need to be
Mail canvasses were challenging addresses for no reason. The irony is that the postal service has been so underfunded that mail often doesn't come anyway. Relying on USPS to verify addresses is ineffectual- and asking for proof of residence out of nowhere is unfair.
We had -one- touchscreen voting booth. And all our paper ballots were being spoiled by the wrong pens. People with special needs were left waiting for half an hour to get audio ballots. (When I voted at my university, every single booth was a touchscreen.)
People weren't receiving mail-in ballots in time for them to be postmarked before election day. Even though the ballots look the exact same, if someone brought in a mail ballot already completed we couldn't count it and they would have to vote again.
Pollwatchers and lawyers were coming in to "check" on our precinct. But they made sure WE weren't doing anything wrong- and they ignored the things that the CITY got wrong. We never got those right pens.
We never saw anyone who wasn't eligible to vote. We only saw ways in which they were prevented from voting when they had every right to.
