There are 100,000 fewer Election Day polling places in 2024

During the 2022 midterms, voters cast their ballots at just under 95,000 polling places across the country—half the number of locations available four years prior. The reduction follows a momentous 2013 Supreme Court decision, and the downward trend has some voting rights groups sounding the alarm ahead of November’s presidential election.

National data from the independent, nonpartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission shows declining polling place availability nationwide. A 2018 survey found more than 200,000 polling places in use. That number dropped to just over 132,000 in 2020’s report, and fell again to 94,793 physical polling places in 2022.

Fewer places to cast a ballot can be a barrier to voting for many people, especially low-income individuals who may lack transportation or time off to vote.

Leslie Proll, senior director of the voting rights program at the nonprofit Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, has been tracking the decrease in the number of polling places and said it can be traced back to the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision.

In its ruling, the high court found parts of the Voting Rights Act to be unconstitutional. In particular, justices struck down Section 5 of the 1965 law, which required certain state and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before making any changes to their voting laws or practices.

That means that local election offices can now, Proll said, “close down [polling places], limit the hours, do anything they want, without having to seek that preclearance.” Research from the group identified 868 polling places that were closed in jurisdictions that previously were subject to Section 5.

Democratic lawmakers in Congress have looked to reinstate parts of the Voting Rights Act by introducing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the late congressman and civil rights leader. The legislation would update the formula used in Section 5 that determines which areas must seek preclearance. But Republican opposition has stymied the bill. President Joe Biden called on Congress again last week in his State of the Union address to pass the act.

The Supreme Court decision alone does not account for the dramatic decrease in polling places. The COVID-19 pandemic also played a role, altering how many Americans vote. Amid stay-at-home orders, states were forced to rethink their voting procedures. Some embraced vote-by-mail and absentee options that remain in place today. As a result, some states have less of a need for physical polling places and have consolidated them.

The negative effects of closing local polling places can be dramatic. A 2020 study by Enrico Catoni in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics found that an increase of one mile in the distance someone must travel to a polling location reduces turnout from majority-minority districts by 19%, compared to a 5% reduction for majority-white districts.

What’s more, fewer polling places can mean longer lines at those still open, which in turn can discourage people from voting. These reductions also take time and effort to communicate, as it’s incumbent on officials to educate voters on their new voting location. That can also hurt turnout.

“As long as [Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act] is not the law of the land, local officials can do whatever they want, change things in a hurry and make it very inconvenient [to vote],” Proll said.

Ben Hovland, chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said his group first identified the decline in physical polling places in 2017, and said that some of them can be attributed to “policy decisions.” He noted that, regardless of why, many states appear to have moved towards a “vote center model,” where a polling place combines multiple precincts into one location. Voters can cast their ballot at any vote center in their jurisdiction.

“Part of that is recognizing people's lifestyles: you may commute to work [and] depending on your hours, it may not be convenient for you to get to the polling place in your neighborhood,” Hovland said. “You may see a constriction in number because those sites are larger and serve more people.”

Liz Avore, a senior policy advisor at the nonprofit Voting Rights Lab, which tracks election-related legislation across the country, lamented the fact that some states have since banned or restricted 2020-era innovations that could address the decline, such as the use of temporary or mobile voting sites and curbside voting.

Nevertheless, the various factors that have contributed to the decline have led to an unevenness in polling place availability, where in one state there may only be one polling station in an entire county and in another state, there may be dozens in one county.

Complicating that issue are localized concerns. At an event last month in Washington, D.C., Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said fewer schools in his state are willing to be polling places because of security concerns. Churches, he said, “got fed up and quit” as polling locations as they became swept up in the debate over the state’s 2022 constitutional amendment to ban abortion.

“In my administration, I don't have 4,000 buildings around the state that I control, that I can make voting locations,” Adams said. “I'm relying on the private sector, I'm relying on community centers, churches, schools. And more and more of those places don't want to be voting locations.”

Avore noted that Arizona is looking to combat a similar trend with pending legislation that would force schools to act as a polling place. She said such bills are “guilty of ignoring what the underlying issue is” when it comes to schools as voting locations, which is campus security and safety.

Further discouraging churches and schools, Adams said, is that the Biden administration has stepped up its enforcement of polling places’ compliance with the American with Disabilities Act. Some places are subject to ongoing litigation, he said.

And it may be harder to get the private sector to offer up buildings as polling places in some states, Hovland noted, given that legislatures have banned private or philanthropic donations to elections. The use of a business as a polling place, even a disused mall or shopping center, could be seen as an in-kind donation.

The downward trend in polling places reflects, Hovland said, a “shift” in how Americans vote. Elections officials must "take into account how Americans are engaging with the process and make the best decisions to serve the voters,” he said.