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Tom schad
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Jeff Zillgitt
| USA TODAY
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LOS ANGELES – Shabazz Williams walked out of Staples Center on election day dressed in a Lakers jersey and team face mask, his complete civic duty.
Williams, 38, knew he could have voted at a polling station closer to his home in Sherman Oaks, about a 15-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles. But where is the fun in that?
Instead, the Lakers fan donned a jersey and walked to the team’s arena, where he said it took him no more than 15 minutes to fill out his ballot.
“I go to Staples Center every year to watch games,” said Williams, “and this would have been the first year that I haven’t been there.”
Similar scenes unfolded in major metropolitan areas across the country last week, as dozens of professional and university sports facilities joined in the electoral process – most, like the Staples Center, for the first time.
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Some sites have become vote counting centers or have hosted voter registration campaigns. Others served as drop-off points for mail-in ballots. And dozens of arenas or professional stadiums greeted voters in person, on or before election day.
“I think it’s great that they got to do it here at the stadium,” said Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid, who voted at Arrowhead Stadium on election day.
The use of sports arenas as polling stations was symbolic, to some extent – another way for leagues and teams to show they support the cause. But there was also a tangible impact behind the gesture.
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USA TODAY Sports contacted local election officials and compiled voter turnout data from 29 counties in which 40 arenas and professional stadiums were used as voting locations. Data showed that over 298,000 people voted in these places in one way or another. (Many counties were only able to provide partial data immediately after the election, and New York officials, who had voted at two sports venues, did not respond to repeated requests for his numbers.)
Benjamin Hovland, the chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, said the availability of arenas and sports stadiums “absolutely made a difference” in helping the elections run amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What we’ve seen with so many of these (sports) facilities is when they volunteered, when they made themselves available, it solved major issues for election officials,” Hovland said, whose agency provides federal support to state and local election officials.
‘An evidence’
As late spring turned to early summer, election officials across the country saw the start of an impending challenge.
The death of George Floyd and the national movement for social justice have led to an increase in voter interest and enthusiasm, meaning their facilities are likely to accommodate more voters than in previous years. But the ongoing pandemic also meant that some of their traditional polling stations, such as senior citizens’ centers and schools, would not be available.
Replacement places needed to check a list of boxes. They had to be big enough to allow social distancing, with reliable internet, ample parking, security features, ADA accessibility, and proximity to public transportation, to begin with. They also had to be available for six weeks, in some cases.
“Sometimes people don’t achieve everything that (a polling center) needs,” said Paul Gronke, professor of political science at Reed College.
“When these sports facilities started arriving, I think (for) a lot of people in my community, it was one of those head-banging moments. Like a boy, it’s obvious, right? It really is. these characteristics. “
NBA teams were the first to offer their arenas as voting sites, in a deal with the players’ association following Jacob Blake’s filming in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Twenty-three teams provided arenas and practice rooms for voting and voting-related activities, including early voting, election officer training locations, dumps, non-voter registration events. supporters and voting on Election Day.
In Washington, DC, Wizards officers, coaches and players greeted voters at Capital One Arena on election day. Coach Scott Brooks, who lives a few blocks from the arena, voted there. In Chicago, twice as many people voted at United Center than any other universal voting site or constituency, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. And more than 30,000 people voted at the American Airlines Center in Dallas and the Smoothie King Arena in New Orleans.
No professional sports arena, however, has hosted more voters than the Atlanta Hawks’ State Farm Arena, according to data from USA TODAY Sports.
Nearly 40,000 Fulton County residents voted in the arena in early voting in Georgia, a key state in which Joe Biden holds a narrow lead over Donald Trump. The team wanted to offer a non-partisan site without long waiting times. With 302 voting machines in physically remote locations, polling officers pushed the lines forward even when there were 3,000 people a day during the first week of early voting.
“The most important thing for us was to take that first step,” said Hawks coach Lloyd Pierce. “We were the first team to activate our arena. It is an idea, a reflection and an element of action which succeeded. It started as an idea and then became obvious. … of. “
Pierce, who volunteered to host an early vote, said he will never forget the father who got his son to vote for the first time. Hawks CEO Steve Koonin said watching people vote in the arena was “a lot more emotional than I ever thought.”
Koonin told the story of an 80-year-old black man who used a walker. The man told Koonin he hadn’t voted for 30 years because he didn’t think his vote made a difference. He put his ballot in the machine, the machine said his vote had been accepted, and the man started to cry.
“We were helping our state and our city to participate in the democratic process,” Koonin said. “In addition, we were helping to facilitate the vote. This is how it should be. No one should stand in line for 10 hours to vote or vote at a Kiwanis club or library. Nothing against these places, but the vote should take place in large rooms. “
The start of a trend?
In Los Angeles, the use of sports venues like Staples Center and Dodger Stadium was part of a larger shift to a polling center model – which could become a trend. Instead of being assigned a specific polling station, the county set up several centers and invited its residents to vote at a location of their choice.
University of Rhode Island assistant professor Gretchen Macht and her team spent polling day observing some of these sites as part of the URI VOTES project, which seeks to use the data to improve voting procedures. At Dodger Stadium, she saw waves of team-clad fans who decided to vote there almost as a way to celebrate the team’s recent World Series title. The new voters were greeted with cheers from election officials.
“If you are voting for the first time, what better place to exercise your right to vote than a place that will be memorable like this?” Macht said. “I think it has some value.”
Staples Center and Dodger Stadium were each among the most profitable voting centers in the county, in terms of attendance. And Los Angeles County Registrar-Clerk Dean Logan wrote in an email that his office is seeing signs of excitement about voting at these and other sports venues – though many people still chose to vote in a community center or neighborhood town hall.
“Professional sports sites and their corresponding franchises played an important role in the general election,” Logan wrote. “Not only by serving as a voting center, but as a community partner in civic engagement and empowerment.”
Hovland, the federal voting official, said it would be difficult to quantify the impact of arenas and sports stadiums on the 2020 election due to county-to-county variations and the prevalence of voting by correspondence. But he suggested they could have influenced even voters who voted elsewhere.
“Maybe I didn’t go to the Pepsi Center because it wasn’t my location in downtown Denver, but I saw this and thought it was cool. And then I am. went and got where I was supposed to vote, and I went to vote, because I saw this, ”Hovland said.
He also thanked the sports world for their voting efforts beyond the use of arenas and stadiums. Professional and college teams, for example, ran voter registration campaigns to ensure all of their athletes were registered to vote. And Lakers star LeBron James created an organization called “More Than a Vote” which, among other things, recruited 40,000 people to serve as polling officers.
The use of sports venues as polling stations this year was basically a one-off solution to the one-off challenges presented by COVID-19. In fact, in a typical year, many of the venues used to vote would otherwise have hosted games or other events, such as concerts.
But experts and election officials are hoping their partnerships with sports organizations continue – and that voting in a stadium or arena could become mainstream.
“A sports arena has a kind of community feeling. There is the fan base, and the feeling that it’s a gathering place,” said Gronke, the political science professor.
“I hope these (arenas) become a trend. I don’t know if it will. But I hope it will.”
Contribution: Peter Barzilai and Mike Freeman
Follow the reporters on Twitter @ joshlpeter11, @Tom_Schad and @JeffZillgitt.
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