Numlock Sunday: November 4, 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to my friend and former colleague Rob Arthur, who a few weeks ago wrote “How The Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Led To Hundreds Of Closed Polls” with Allison McCann for Vice News. Here's what I wrote about it:

The Voting Rights Act required parts of the country with a history of discrimination to clear changes to voting with the federal government. In 2013, the Supreme Court got rid of that requirement. But an analysis of over 94,000 polling places between 2012 and 2016 covering 90 percent of electoral jurisdictions found that the areas that had been subject to the Voting Rights Act closed down 2.6 percent of their polling places, considerably higher than the 2 percent of polling places shut down in the rest of the country. This disproportionately affected mi…