DODGE CITY, Kan._In recent weeks, Dodge City became a cause celebre among left-leaning activists after county officials moved the city's longtime polling station to a new location outside city limits _ more than a mile past the last bus stop.
Nationally, the belief quickly spread that election officials were trying to suppress the city's predominantly Latino population, many of whom work at meatpacking plants. Celebrities including Melissa Etheridge and Debra Messing leaped into action to help organize Lyft rides and buses for any voters who needed transportation. Organizers from across Kansas _ and as far away from San Diego _ rushed to help volunteer on the front lines.
But Tuesday, the transportation fears fizzled as volunteer buses and carpools remained idle in Dodge City, and activists and residents agreed that the controversy was overblown.
"The national story doesn't really appear to be the real story on the ground," said Edgar Pando, a Dodge City attorney who provides legal aid to low- and middle-income Kansans. "People sort of extrapolated a meaning that wasn't there, outside looking in, and that seems to be the general consensus."
As of early afternoon, only about 10 or 15 voters mistakenly showed up to the old Civic Center polling station in Dodge City, where get-out-the-vote organizers loitered in an empty parking lot, waiting for someone to help.
Nancy Yost _ who lives on the opposite side of the state, in Lawrence _ with two of her friends, rented a full-size tour bus to help voters get to the polling station, drawn by the stories about the Dodge City controversy.
But Tuesday afternoon, she sat in the empty bus, which had been idle in the Civic Center parking lot all day. But she didn't regret the decision.
"Our intention was to come and help people, if they needed help, to overcome an obstacle, and it's still an obstacle, and _ so be it," Yost said. "It's OK." She declined to say how much the bus cost. "We felt that it was a good thing to do, and so we chose to do it."
Similar feelings had overcome Stephen, 70, and his wife Eunice, 71, husband and wife, who also came from Lawrence to volunteer with the local Democratic Party to help get voters to the polls, had similar feeling.
Stephen Ruttinger _ who wore a "Vietnam Veteran" hat that said "Don't let the gray hair fool you, we can still kick ass" _ became tearful as he started talking about his military service as the reason he volunteered to help get out the vote.
"I'm a Vietnam vet, and allegedly, I put it on the line for this," Ruttinger said, his voice halting as he spoke in the gravel parking lot outside the polling location. "It moves me a little bit, I guess."
One of the voters to accept a ride to the polls was Diego Marquina-Mendez, 18, who rode over from the Dodge City Community College to vote for the first time.
His parents emigrated from Mexico and can't vote, and "they kind of bugged me about it, about how I have the responsibility to vote, and I should do that," Marquina-Mendez said. He and his family have been turned off by President Donald Trump's stances on immigrants.
But Marquina-Mendez had trouble getting his friends and classmates interested at getting involved with voting. "I feel like maybe more people should try to get informed about voting, because I have some friends who didn't really register to vote," he said.
Past voter turnout from Dodge City's Latino residents has been abysmally low, and for several hours in the late morning and the early afternoon Tuesday, the voters who showed up to Dodge City's polling station were overwhelmingly white.
The problem wasn't a lack of buses. The problem is that the area's Latino population has been "disenfranchised," said Johnny Dunlap, the Ford County Democratic Party chairman.
"By the numbers we have, the registered Hispanic voters in Dodge City only show up at the polls in the midterms at a rate of about 17 percent," Dunlap said. "So there's something wrong, right? When the white population shows up with 61 percent, and Hispanic only has 17 percent, there's something not right about that. ... There are currently no Hispanic elected officials in Ford County, and we're 60 percent Hispanic here."
Pardo, the attorney, said the issue might be that newly naturalized citizens or the children of immigrants haven't historically been encouraged to get involved. "You're not raised in a household that teaches you to participate civically and to vote and to inform yourself," Pardo said, also citing past problems with a lack of bilingual signage in the city. "The voters here, especially Hispanic voters, don't feel invited to partake."
The polling station Tuesday had signs in English and Spanish, but it was less welcome to journalists trying to monitor the situation: An attorney hired by the county forbade journalists on site from taking photos inside.
It is typical for journalists to be allowed to take photographs inside of polling stations. The Times took a photo before the attorney, Brad Schlozman, informed a reporter of the rule.
But the decision to forbid photographs might not be as notable as the attorney passing along the order: Schlozman, who was a Justice Department attorney in the George W. Bush administration, received notoriety a decade ago for being the subject of an inspector general's report accusing him a politicizing the department's nonpartisan hiring process.
"My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section," Schlozman wrote in one email released in the investigation.
Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox, who manages polling stations in the county, later said she thought allowing media inside to document the Dodge City polling station would be "too disruptive" and that she would be releasing government-approved photos of the polling station later.
