Heather Curtis

WMAL.com

WASHINGTON — (WMAL) The Montgomery County Board of Elections made a last minute change to its list of recommended early voting sites Wednesday. The night before the Maryland State Board of Elections is scheduled to vote on the county’s recommendations, the county board voted to keep an early voting site in Burtonsville instead of moving it to Brookeville as originally planned.

“I don’t think that they had much of a choice because the site that they choose in Brookeville, Maryland was really unacceptable in many ways,” said board member David Naimon.

Some Democrats in the county called the proposed move voter suppression because it would have been difficult for low-income and minority voters from Burtonsville to get to Brookeville to cast their ballots.

The board is standing by its recommendation to move an early voting location in Chevy Chase to Potomac. Naimon will ask the state BOE today to reject that site.

“I think that that was a decision that’s very hard to justify by almost any measure,” Naimon said adding going to Potomac is inconvenient for people who live in downtown Bethesda, especially those who don’t own cars. Instead of walking a few minutes to get to the site in Chevy Chase, these people would have to take a 50 minute bus ride to get to Potomac.

The state board will vote today whether to accept the county’s list of nine recommended voting sites. Eight of these sites are the same as last year.

In order to qualify as an early voting site, a location needs to meet a number of requirements including being accessible by public transit. In addition, 80 percent of residents in the county need to live within 5 miles of one of the sites. Naimon said the plan approved for 2014 put 93 percent of residents within that distance.

(Photo: mymcmedia.org)