More on Early Voting Locations in MoCo

The saga of MoCo early voting centers continues.

The current fracas started when in September the MoCo Board of Elections, by a party vote of 3 Republicans to 2 Democrats suddenly said two locations used previously, Praisner and Lawton, would no longer be used for early voting. Instead they voted for two other early voting centers.

The Democrats on the Bd of Elections, and then many others, were extremely upset. Basically they said that two early voting centers with large numbers of voters, many of them minorities, would be closed and replaced by early voting sites that were much less convenient for most voters.

After a huge outpouring of outrage, today the MoCo Board of Elections held a special meeting where the president, a Republican, offered what he called a compromise. He made a motion to change the previous vote on early voting centers by using the Praisner Center. The Democrats on the Board protested that the Lawton Center should also continue to be used, instead of a Potomac location they said was less convenient.

The debate on this subject was very long and, most unfortunately, nasty and personal at times. One Republican member of the Board alleged that the whole controversy was stirred up by the MoCo Democratic party. 

Democrats on the Board said there was little or no evidence that the switch from the Bethesda early voting location to Potomac would result in making it more easy for more people to vote and they presented lots of facts, statistics, and maps to prove their point.

At the end of the meeting, after public input that started out in a dignified manner degenerated into members of the audience yelling at the Board members, the Board voted 3-2 for what the Republicans called their compromise. The Praisner Center was reinstated as an early voting site but Bethesda was not.

It is likely that this controversy will continue.