This story is part of ABC News’ month-long series “Protecting your vote,” profiling people from across the country who are dedicated to ensuring the integrity of the voting process.

Jesse Lee Hanson accepts some of the reasons why getting to his polling place on Election Day is a challenge.

He lives in rural Georgia, where homes are separated by acres of farmland, doesn’t own a car and walks with a cane after suffering two strokes and a heart attack — all of which have made getting around difficult.

But Hanson says he’s struggling to understand why his home in Warren County, Ga., decided to close five of six polling places, forcing him to travel nearly three times the distance to cast his vote.

“They didn’t give us a reason or anything,” Hanson told ABC News’ Steve Osunsami. “I had a little faith in politics, but now I have no faith in politics.”

Like Hanson, millions of Americans experienced changes in the way they vote as local election officials in rural and urban areas closed thousands of polling places on Election Day.

More than one in five polling places has closed in the past decade, according to an ABC News and ABC Owned Stations analysis of data from the Survey of Election Administration and Voting, the Center for New Data and the Center for Public Integrity. Between 2012 and 2022, the United States lost 27,000 polling places, with the number of polling places on Election Day falling from about 116,000 in 2012 to less than 89,000 in 2022.

The analysis found that poll closings accelerated in 2013 after the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. the federal government in some states.

Activists and experts who spoke to ABC News said the decision allowed local governments in areas with a history of discriminatory voting practices to make changes that hurt black and brown voters.

“Jurisdictions basically saw the floodgates open … by passing new laws and procedures, even hours after that decision was issued, to change the voting rules,” said Kareem Crayton, vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank. nonprofit tank. . “When polling places go down and when you have fewer access points to vote, that means people in an average election are less likely to … show up.”

“A very big deal”

Election officials say there are a variety of reasons they decide to close polling places, including changing voter preferences, budget changes and accessibility concerns. Some states, mostly in the West, lost most of their polling places as they switched to voting by mail. Others closed polling places when they consolidated neighborhood polls into more centralized county-wide voting centers.

However, ABC’s analysis of the data identified a dozen states that did not make major changes to their election procedures, yet reduced the number of places to vote in person on Election Day. These include key states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Georgia, which alone lost 400 polling places on Election Day in 2010.

In Hanson’s home in Warren County, Georgia, five of six polling places were closed shortly after the Supreme Court reduced federal oversight of the election. The county, which is majority black and low-income, was left with just one polling place to cover nearly 300 square miles.

For Wanda Jenkins, a resident of Beall Springs, Ga., the change meant she had to travel an additional seven miles by car compared to voting at the local fire station, where she worked as a poll worker for more than a decade before that place. closed.

“He would have been better served in my community if he had stayed here,” said Jenkins, who recalled seeing hundreds of voters each election day. “It’s a very big deal for ordinary voters.”

When researchers examined the impact of polling place location on voter turnout, they found that when the distance to a polling place increased by a quarter mile, up to 5 percent of voters stopped going to the polls. Additional research has shown that lack of access to a personal vehicle is one of the biggest factors in inequality in voter turnout.

Following the closures in Warren County, voter turnout dropped from 40 percent in the 2010 midterms to 35 percent in the 2014 midterms. While voter turnout declined in Georgia during that time, Warren County’s decline was more greater than the decrease at the state level.

“I think it turned off a lot of voters who maybe don’t have … transportation,” said Jenkins, who added that he believes the county closed the polling place to disadvantage black voters.

Warren County officials told ABC News the closures were not targeted and did not impact voter turnout, while claiming the changes saved the county nearly $30,000 in printing costs alone during major elections.

Other battleground states have seen a disparity in poll closings. In Wisconsin, where nearly eight in 10 residents are white, the racially diverse communities of the Milwaukee area and nearby Kenosha and Racine saw major declines in the number of polling places. In Ohio, the counties with the biggest declines were among the poorest in the state — both rural and urban.

In justifying the reduction in the number of polling places, election officials have pointed to reduced budgets, accessibility concerns, changing voter preferences, security issues and population changes, among other reasons.

“Against history and the weight of evidence we’ve seen over the decades, unfortunately, jurisdictions are using polling station closings to effectively restrict voting,” said Leslie Proll, senior director of the Conference’s Voting Rights Program. of Civil Management. and Human Rights.

While the US saw the gap in voter turnout between whites and non-whites in the decades following the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, the gap widened for the first time in the decade following the 2013 Shelby County Supreme Court decision , according to a 2024 report by the Brennan Center.

“There is no need for so many polling stations”

In Lincoln County, Georgia, a precinct battle is brewing ahead of the upcoming election. A rural area, the county is bordered by a reservoir named after former Senator Strom Thurmond, the most prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act.

After seeing counties like Warren successfully reduce their polling places, Lincoln County Elections Director Lilvender Bolton said he decided to consolidate the county’s seven polling places two years ago. Bolton, who is black, tried unsuccessfully to close all but one polling station in 2022 and ended up consolidating the seven polling stations into three locations last year.

“I would have a staff that sits there all day and one person come in to vote,” said Bolton, who explained that the polling places needed to be upgraded. “There was no need for that many polling stations.”

Bolton said her small elections office is better suited to handle the newly consolidated polling places, which occupy new modern and accessible buildings, and that voters are still able to easily cast ballots in the 260-square-mile county.

But when Lincoln County’s plan to consolidate polling places made national news and sparked backlash from community members, Bolton said she was shocked and personally hurt by the response to what she says was a well-intentioned change.

“Everybody was just upset because, ‘Oh, you just don’t want black people to vote,'” said Bolton, who received a petition signed by hundreds of community members and was accosted in the street by critics.

“All these news agencies were calling me,” Bolton said. “I’d be talking, they’d ask me what’s going on, and then before the conversation was over, they’d say, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ And I said “No”. And they said, “Are you black?” And when I told them they were, they were surprised.”

“Why disenfranchise someone?”

Leading the charge against poll consolidation in Lincoln County is the Rev. Denise Freeman, a community activist who is now running as a Democrat to serve as chairman of the board of commissioners in the red county.

After years of hard-won progress from the civil rights movement, Freeman said the decision to close the polls was a step in the wrong direction, making it harder for black people in the county and poor residents to vote. .

The chairman of the Lincoln County Commission denied the closings were targeted and said the new polling places are more accessible to voters.

“The thing about it is, why disenfranchise anybody? Why shut down any survey?” Freeman said. “If we were to do things right, we would make sure that every person has the right to vote.”

While her opposition to consolidation last year failed to stop the plan from taking effect, Freeman has vowed to restore the county’s polling places if she wins the election in less than two weeks.

“People don’t understand the hardships they put good people through when they make stupid and unnecessary changes in politics,” she said.

ABC News’ Hannah Prince contributed to this report.