Large, iconic venues such as Dodger Stadium and the Staples Center in Los Angeles as well as State Farm Arena in Atlanta will serve as polling places this fall -- open to voters for early voting as well as on Election Day itself.
The shift to sports arenas and other large venues as voting centers offers a way to accommodate in-person voting with fewer poll workers and more space to socially distance than a regular neighborhood polling place offers.
It also comes as President Donald Trump continues to attack mail-in voting -- and as he encourages his supporters to visit in-person polling places even if they mail in ballots, in order to double-check that their votes have been received. Even as recently as Friday, when absentee ballots began to be sent out in North Carolina, Trump reaffirmed his call to supporters to vote in person after voting by mail, a move that sent alarms to election officials across the country.
However, voting in large arenas led to major problems in some primaries earlier this year. One issue is that technical glitches or shortages don't affect just a few voters but massive numbers of voters, injecting a new level of uncertainty into an election that already has experts worried.
Los Angeles County's experience
When Los Angeles voters went to the polls on Super Tuesday -- March 3 -- to vote in the primary election earlier this year, the county promoted more than 970 new voting centers where any registered voter could go instead of their traditional neighborhood polling place -- a planned change that had been in the works before Covid.
It wasn't a smooth transition, and 15% of voters reported waiting in line more than two hours to cast ballots, The electronic pollbooks had issues synchronizing data, and many locations had fewer pollbooks than needed to handle voter turnout, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's office, which published a report in March.
"I think they've learned from some of those tech failures in the beginning," Los Angeles Democratic Party Chairman Mark Gonzalez said. For November, he said, the county plans to have a tech support person at each location to fix problems more quickly as they arise.
Early voting in Georgia
In Georgia, the State Farm Arena, home to the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, will be one of numerous early voting locations open to all Fulton County voters for a three-week period this fall -- a repeat engagement after the arena was used for an August runoff election.
State Rep. David Dreyer, a Democrat who serves as the chair of Fulton County's House delegation, was deeply involved in arranging State Farm Arena as an early voting center. He told CNN he believes that using the Hawks' arena in November will help mitigate the myriad issues the city experienced in the primary in June.
"When you think about a smaller venue to divide people up, there's just not that much room for people to wait in line 6 feet apart. What you'll end up having is what we ended up having in the first primary election before we had State Farm Arena," Dreyer said.
Dreyer said using the arena as a voting center in the runoff election in August "worked extremely well," and that although the turnout in that election was much lower than what the city will face in November, the site is ready to run smoothly on a massive scale.
"I feel much more secure taking my kids to vote along with me to State Farm than I would in other places because it's easier to implement the best protocol, because you have some of the best people, and you have more space to adequately implement the best protocol," he said.
Other officials, however, said they're worried about the logistics of using a new space.
"I think there's so many unknowns at this point," Fulton County Democratic Party Chair LeWanna Heard-Tucker said. "I think when you have such a big area, you know, things walk off and run off, and so I think that's a concern, is that in such a big facility, we won't know if something disappears or what supplies look like."
At neighborhood polling places, she noted, workers can see what they're running short of. "You can tell that, hey, there's no paper or the lines are so long that you know people are getting frustrated. So you won't necessarily have the line of sight to some of that frustration."
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Officials prep for arena polling places as Trump pushes in-person voting - CNN
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