attribution: Michael Freshman - CC
This fall, Daily Kos community member Bill Busa exposed North Carolina's sneaky new voter suppression tool in which county boards of elections in the state closed almost one-third of the state’s early voting polling places in 2014, replacing them with polls at new locations. The result of moving those early voting locations: African American voters found themselves 350,000 miles farther away from their nearest early voting sites than they were in 2012, while white voters’ total distance-to-poll increased by only 21,000 miles.
This blatant attempt to keep black voters from the polls by making it harder for them to vote, Busa and voting rights organizations he's been working with say, is akin to "poll taxes and literacy tests did during the South’s Jim Crow era." It's one Busa has vowed to fight, both by exposing the ploy in North Carolina and by creating a new policy-driven, non-profit data analysis firm, Insightus, which will "harnesses the 21st Century technology of data science to promote a just, civil, democratic and sustainable world."