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Lawyers Manning Voting Hotlines Across the Country

Tens of thousands of phone calls from concerned voters have poured in to lawyer-staffed hotlines Tuesday, said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Many of those calls are from African-American or Latino voters, she said, with complaints of long lines or registration issues at the polls.

Specific issues they’re seeing crop up include students at Florida Atlantic University being told their votes won’t count because their campus address is considered a hotel; the temporary outages in Durham County, North Carolina that have led to requests to extend voting hours; and reports of law enforcement being stationed outside polls in Orange County, Florida, causing some voters to feel intimidated.

The states with the highest volume of issues, Ms. Clarke said, have been Florida, Texas, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania and New York—which includes some states that were subject to the Voting Rights Act until the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision that freed state election laws from federal oversight. “We’re concerned about a resurgence of voting discrimination,” she said. Continue Reading