Last month, my parents called me with some big news.Oklahoma was mentioned in The New York Times as being pretty much the only state that didn’t have early, in-person early voting underway.I immediately – and wrongly – insisted that there was no way that I lived in a state that had some of the worst in-person early voting access.Then exactly a week before Election Day, ABC News aired a U.S. map on its morning newscast showing that nearly 47.6 million Americans had already voted early. Oklahoma, Alabama and New Hampshire were noticeably shaded gray – the only three states that still didn’t have some form of early voting already in progress.A week out from the U.S. presidential election, we were running neck-and-neck with Alabama and New Hampshire for being the biggest voting stinkhole in America.I don’t know about you, but that’s not an election contest I want to win.It’s downright embarrassing – for the three states.But it also explains why in 2020 – when Donald Trump was facing Joe Biden – I had to wait in a line that wound through an empty field outside an Oklahoma church for two hours to exercise my fundamental right on Election Day. One person, who didn’t have time to wait, even tried to skirt the line by sneaking in the back door.Then last week, on the first day of early voting for the latest presidential race – Trump versus Kamala Harris – cars were backed up over a mile on Lincoln Boulevard – the state Capitol’s main drag – trying to access an early polling site. The parking lot was full, and the voting line wound around the building.On Saturday, as a storm moved in, voters at an Oklahoma County polling site said they had already waited three hours to vote and weren’t even at the front of the line. The Edmond polling location had closed nearly two hours earlier, but there were still hundreds of people in line. (Everyone already in line was allowed to vote, per state law.)I want to toast our Republican run Legislature for continuing to make one of our democratic duties a complete and total clusterfudge.Despite years of knowing about long lines, they’re still managing to make voting as hard as possible. Is it any wonder that Oklahoma has some of the worst turnout rates in the nation?How many voters are so discouraged by these long lines that ...
