Michael Mount | Longreads | Month 2019 | 25 minutes (6,236 words)
The home I moved into was not what you might associate with Martha’s Vineyard: it wasn’t a sweeping palatial estate near the ocean with views of crispy white foam. It was a simple shingled house tucked far in the woods, sitting in a rustic subdivision near a graveyard and just beyond the commercial centers of the Island, with power lines cutting an artery through its backyard. I schlepped my things inside, bubbling with optimism about what my year of rest and revelation would bring. My housemate was a 70-year-old man who helped me move my luggage while screaming at the Patriots game every time he walked by. It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that he asked questions.
“Most people don’t move out here until May,” he said. “What are you running away from?”
“Just New York.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said, laughing.
It was September of 2013 and I had left everything in Brooklyn. All of the carefully assembled Ikea furniture. My job. It all seemed to recede behind me on that final glimpse from the ferry that morning as I watched Woods Hole, Massachusetts, shrinking to a pinhole. All of the chaos and the heartbreak of summer in New York was like a muted roar — Facebook would remind me, but I had every reason to forget.
Some families have houses on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t. My friend from home (home is a distant place) had moved to the Island last year to work full time for an agricultural non-profit. I did not know her well but her suggestion came to me in a time of need:
“If you hate New York so much,” she said, “you should move out to the Island for a winter and write your book. There are tons of writers out here.”
I was 24 and as weightless as dandelion molt. Leaving a job meant nothing. My longest relationship had been eight months long. I knew one person on Martha’s Vineyard and — it seemed — only a few more in New York. It hardly felt like a sacrifice. Those in New York whom I told about my plan expressed two contrasting perspectives: “Why would you do that?” and “I’m so jealous.” I chose to listen to only the latter.
It only took two trips to the car to carry all my things into the old man’s house. He seemed fine with me renting the room for next to nothing — if anything he was enthused to continue renting past Labor Day, to have company at the end of the season.
That evening we watched Tom Brady smear the Jets. During commercial breaks he fiddled with a small police scanner sitting beside his armchair; there were distant calls for drunk driving or speeding incidents. When it was time to eat he walked slowly to the kitchen and boiled two hot dogs, piling them on a paper plate.
“No dishes this way,” he said. “Bachelor life.” Read more…
As many Thai residents say, “Thai jails are only for the poor.” Exhibit A: the 27-year-old socialite named Vorayuth “Boss” Yoovidhya, part of the billionaire family who owns the Red Bull beverage empire. In 2012, he mortally wounded police officer Wichean Glanprasert while driving, then he fled the scene. Boss remains free. Glanprasert’s family mourn while wrestling with this accepted double standard. For The Walrus, Martha Mendoza follows the Red Bull family’s trail of shell companies, and Boss’ social media posts, to findhow they not only protect their assets, but how Boss and other Thai elites evade prosecution while protestors and journalists routinely end up in prison for minor offenses.
Within weeks of the incident, Boss was back to enjoying his family’s jet-set lifestyle: he flew around the world on private Red Bull jets, cheered the company’s Formula One racing team from Red Bull’s VIP seats, and kept a shiny black Porsche Carrera in London with custom licence plates—B055 RBR, or Boss Red Bull racing.
An Interpol arrest notice was issued five years after the accident, but so far, it has effectively been useless. Boss is reported to have at least two passports and a complex network of offshore accounts, and with these tools, he’s able to travel the world with impunity. More than 120 photos posted on Facebook and Instagram, as well as some racing blogs, show Boss visiting at least nine countries since Glanprasert’s death. Stops include the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Osaka, Japan, where he posed, grinning and wearing robes from Hogwarts’s darkest dorm, Slytherin house. He’s cruised Monaco’s harbour, snowboarded Japan’s fresh powder, and celebrated his birthday at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London. This means that while authorities say they’ve had no idea where Boss was, his friends, family, and all of their followers seem to have had no doubt about his whereabouts and the good times he’s been having. One summer, in Japan, he posted a ten-second video of sausage and eggs decorated with seaweed eyes, tagging a young relative. His parents responded with a thumbs up.
In Thailand, many say that the justice system has two tracks: one for the elite and one for everybody else. This is seen not just through brazen killings, like that of Glanprasert, but also through financial schemes used by the country’s wealthy. During the time Boss hid in plain sight, an Associated Press (AP) investigation into his whereabouts simultaneously exposed how the Yoovidhya family has spent decades hiding its assets in offshore accounts. As Brooke Harrington, professor of sociology at Dartmouth, said in a 2018 interview with NPR: “The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it’s almost literally unimaginable….National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”
Victor Hugo, pictured sitting in his writing atelier in his home in Guernsey, completed some of his best-known works as an exile on the island. All illustrations by Emma Jacobs.
Emma Jacobs | Longreads | September 2019 | 8 minutes (2,229 words)
Like a cabin in the woods, an island sounds like a writer’s dream: inspiring scenery and a remove from distractions. Here, the mythology creeps in, the writer can achieve an internal calm to match external tranquility, and of course will not suffer in the least from the isolation.
Give the writer a desk at a window with a view. Victor Hugo’s would do nicely. In the late 19th century, the French author lived for 14 years as a political exile on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. He wrote overlooking the sea and, on a clear day, he could see all the way to the hazy coastline of his beloved France.
Engaged with the outside world but removed from it, he produced an outpouring of words — including poems, essays, and books — and most famously completed his five-volume novel, Les Misérables.
I wanted to visit Hugo’s home on Guernsey, called Hauteville House, for a mix of intangible reasons we visit writers’ houses, but mainly out of curiosity about how someone so iconic lived and worked, and for some better understanding of the mind at work here. The house also has a reputation as worth seeing in and of itself, a masterpiece of Hugo the decorator. Hugo scholars, known as Hugoliens, consider it another one of his great works, alongside his books. His son Charles described it as an “autograph of three stories,” and “a poem in many rooms.” I had avoided looking too closely at photos of the house that became synonymous with his time abroad, which might muddy first impressions.
Before my visit, I had imagined Hauteville House standing apart, alone on a hilltop, like the writer-in-exile in a moody series of portraits taken on the neighboring island of Jersey. Seen from various distances and angles, Hugo, sepia-toned, poses on a coastal outcrop known as “The Rock of the Exiles.” In the most arresting portrait, he appears in profile, gazing over the water.
As it turns out, Hugo’s Hauteville House is near the top of a steep, curved street. From the rear, with its spacious garden and an airy facade full of windows, it could pass for a country mansion. But it is hemmed into a row of Georgian-style townhouses.
Hauteville House, now gray, stands out on a quiet block of the town of Saint Peter Port.
During recent renovations, the street-facing side, previously painted in a light shade like its neighbors, was restored to the severe dark gray of Hugo’s era. It has a forest-green fence and three flagpoles, flying the standards of France, Guernsey, and the city of Paris.
It took four years for Hugo to pinball from Paris, which he left in 1851, to Guernsey. After opposing the coup by which Napoleon III replaced France’s nascent democracy with its Second Empire, he had first fled to Belgium, wearing a fake beard to avoid being recognized on the journey.
Hugo was already famous from his works for theater and his wildly successful novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known to English speakers as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The book’s success had literally transformed its namesake, prompting the first extensive renovation of the neglected cathedral in the 1840s. (In a modern twist, the recent 4.5 million euro restoration of Hauteville House was largely funded by French billionaire François Pinault, who has also pledged 100 million euros toward the restoration of fire-damaged Notre-Dame.)
In Belgium, Hugo continued to write scathing tracts about Napoleon III, eventually making himself an unwelcome guest. Next, he and his wife and children joined other European exiles on the Channel Island of Jersey. Expelled again for his political involvement, he finally boarded a steamer named Dispatch for the town of Saint Peter Port on a rainy day in October, 1855.
The picturesque town of Saint Peter Port rises steeply from its modern harbor.
The island of Guernsey, a semi-independent British Crown dependency, is 24 square miles of craggy coastline. Once Hugo bought the (reputedly haunted) Hauteville House in 1856, under the island’s laws, he could not be expelled.
“No longer having a fatherland, I would have a roof,” he wrote in a letter to fellow French writer Jules Janin. Driven from place to place, “I rebuilt [my household] with the patience of an ant. This time, they won’t chase me off again. … From now on, I will be chez moi, the walls, the floorboards and the ceilings will be mine.”
His continued residence assured, Hugo went about redecorating to his own particular tastes.
He collected sea chests from Guernsey’s antique and junk shops, which he had reconfigured into furniture. He covered walls and ceilings with tapestries and oriental rugs and even china plates.
The island of Guernsey is a British Crown dependency, with signs of its historical ties to both Britain and France.
Today, Hauteville House is a tiny French outpost on the island, owned and run by the city of Paris. A painted plaster frieze of scenes from Notre-Dame de Paris greets visitors in the entryway. Guided tours take place in small groups, beginning in the billiard room where the family socialized, and circling upward through the large, three-story townhouse.
Hugo mixed and matched to create eccentric, eclectic rooms. In one ground-floor salon, he united a wall of carved wooden chests, Flemish tapestry, a 19th-century Japanese lantern, Dutch stained glass, a Persian rug, and Chinese paintings on paper.
He incorporated his signature, literally, throughout the house, including the Notre-Dame frieze above the entryway. His initials appear in some cases carved into wood paneling, and as a tile relief over the dining room fireplace. The writer characteristically included words and phrases into the decor. In the dining room, a Latin maxim reads: Exilium vita est (“life is exile”).
“It is necessary to work or die of boredom,” Hugo wrote during his period overseas.
His productivity at Hauteville House was grounded in a strict routine, according to assistant curator, Stéphanie Duluc.
“He rose very early in the morning,” she said, and wrote until lunch, which he took with his family. “Then he would go walking in the afternoon,” most often along the coast to Fermain Bay, where today you’ll find a beach café with picnic tables. Evenings were for revisions.
A visitor in Victor Hugo’s library of Hauteville House.
In 1860, he returned to a manuscript he had begun 15 years before. It revolved around events on a Paris barricade in 1832, and the lives of the characters who converged there.
The tour of Hauteville House continues up to Hugo’s dark wood-and-glass library, dim and densely packed with novels and reference works, and then up one more flight of stairs to the glass-walled “lookout” Hugo had extended from a rooftop window. Roped off to preserve the Delft tiles and a glass window in the floor that serves as a skylight to the stairs below, the remove adds to the aura of Hugo’s sacred, impenetrable workspace. Hugo wrote here, moving between two simple desks that fold out from the wall.
But even standing before Hugo’s inspiring view, it was still strange to imagine Hugo writing Les Misérables from Guernsey, literally facing — masochistically, almost — a country he would not set foot in until political tides turned, if he lived that long.
Hugo wrote another novel he set on Guernsey, called Toilers of the Sea. Its somber dedication reads: “To the rock of hospitality and freedom … where live this noble, little people of the sea, the Island of Guernsey, severe and kind/soft, my present exile and probable tomb.”
Details from the present-day harbor of Saint Peter Port.
In Toilers of the Sea, Hugo paints a peculiar island subject to enveloping fogs and superstitions. Guernsey, in the book, is not isolated per se — the plot is regularly propelled by international travelers arriving on various ships. But the novel’s central drama takes place on a group of barren rocks offshore, where the protagonist, Gilliatt, spends many grueling weeks alone, salvaging the engine of a wrecked steamer — and fights off a monstrous sea creature.
The Guernsey of Toilers of the Sea feels worlds away from the crowded streets of Paris. It also doesn’t sound much like the island of today, which receives over 100,000 cruise passengers a year.
In fact, during my brief visit, I had a nagging sense that Hugo would not have liked what the island has become. Retellings of the writer’s life on Guernsey give prominent place to weekly dinners he hosted for impoverished children on the island near the end of his work on Les Misérables, which comments on income inequality, among other subjects.
The stone gateway before one of the town’s stately homes, which have names like Magnolia House and Fairsea.
Saint Peter Port is still picturesque. My time on the island seemed to disappear as I walked up and down its streets and staircases, encountering wildflowers growing out of crumbling stone walls and pretty Georgian-style houses with names like Magnolia House and Fairsea. But a number of these townhouses now bear the names of asset management firms, a sign of the financial clout of the island, which is known today as a tax haven. Residents drive small but clearly very expensive cars “because they can,” explains a tourist brochure taken from the ferry terminal.
Then again, Hugo himself lived a life full of contradictions and contrasts. He lived in a grand house in which he created a monumental wood-paneled bedroom for himself, incorporating pews from the Chartres Cathedral, a prime example of French Gothic architecture, and an imposingly huge desk. But Hugo actually slept in a small, simple bedroom above it. It is brightly lit, with cheerful yellow walls and a modest bed almost level with the floor.
Under scrutiny, even Hugo’s exile breaks down a little. He received hundreds of visitors in Hauteville House’s richly decorated salons, including pilgrims from all over the world and his French peers, including Alexandre Dumas. Though, Duluc notes, some days Hugo refused to see anyone.
Victor Hugo pictured in the red salon, where he entertained visitors.
But the most preoccupying contradiction is Hugo’s assembling of a masterpiece of the French literary canon and social commentary from a British island.
While dreaming up the colorful cast of Les Mis would be impressive anywhere, Hugo at least had resources to draw on beyond his own memories. He sent journalist Théophile Guérin on fact-checking missions to verify geographic details of Paris and consulted Juliette Drouet, a French actress who became his mistress and joined him on Guernsey, about the memories of her childhood in convent school for another section of the book. After nine years, he made his first return trip to the Continent to visit the site of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium, with his manuscript packed in a waterproof bag. The publishing process sounds maddening: In his biography about Hugo’s masterpiece, The Novel of a Century, scholar and translator David Bellos describes how batches of typeset pages were sent by mail from Brussels to Guernsey for corrections via boat and train, a circuit which could take up to 10 days.
But, despite these obstacles, the book was published, and Les Misérables became an international bestseller.
Was this the silver lining of Hugo’s exile?
While not working on the great American novel, I have found living outside the U.S. in recent years to be helpful for a sense of distance, granting me permission to disengage just enough from the relentless daily news cycle.
Hugo was a mail boat away from the French coast, a safe distance from the thrumming of Paris. While he loved his country with a patriotic fervor that would raise eyebrows today, leaving it ultimately gave him the room to complete his complex ode to France.
A statue of Hugo from 1914 in Candie Gardens looks toward the harbor of Saint Peter Port.
Hugo returned to Paris as soon as Napoleon III fell in 1870. As the long-exiled patriarch of French democracy, he now reached a status at home that Michael Garval, an American professor who studies 19th-century celebrity, told me is hard to translate: “part-Mark Twain, part-Ernest Hemingway, part-I don’t know, Abraham Lincoln.”
Hugo was swept into the social and political worlds of Paris once again. He would have to return for an extended stay in Guernsey later that decade to finish his last novel, Ninety-Three.
“He plays this role of wise grandfather of the Third Republic,” said Garval, manifestly enjoying the adulation that came his way.
“At the end of his life you have this sort of extensive anticipation of his passing and of his eventual glorious afterlife,” he noted. “Typically, for example, streets would not be named after someone until after they’re dead,” but the last street that Hugo lived on was given his name in anticipation of his 80th birthday, celebrated with a parade below his final apartment’s balcony. Somewhere between 2 and 3 million people reportedly turned out for his six-hour funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, a crowd roughly equivalent to the entire population of Paris at the time.
This is the continuing paradox of Hugo today.
To massively compress the story of Les Misérables’ legacy, there have since been hundreds of translations and so many adaptations as to have “a depressing effect on attitudes towards his book,” writes Bellos, so that “serious readers have often turned up their noses at a work they assume to fall below the level of great art.”
Hauteville House still draws 20,000 visitors a year, roughly half English and half French speakers. A retired French couple I met after the tour admit — while they knew some of Hugo’s life’s story — they had never read one of his massive novels in full. But after tracing the narrative told by his fantastical house, they left wanting to try.
“I think one can have never read Hugo and understand this house ultimately as one of his great, great works,” said Duluc. “And I find the visit has been a success when people leave with the desire to read.”
When young writers dream of becoming journalists, how many envision themselves writing for trade magazines like American Shipper and Onion World? I used to work at a tea company which bagged its own tea, and it always amused me when our new issue of a heavy machinery trade mag arrived in the mail. It turns out, those niche publications are now far more stable, and often more lucrative, than most of the mainstream papers and magazines. Why was I laughing? I had to work at a tea shop to make a living as a writer.
Mainstream news organizations in search of new revenue streams have also moved into specialized coverage and research. In 2017, Digiday reported that Politico Pro — Politico’s subscription-based news and intelligence service — had 20,000 paying subscribers and accounted for half of Politico’s total revenue. In 2011, Bloomberg bought the Bureau of National Affairs, a trade publisher, and rebranded it as Bloomberg BNA; Business Insider launched Business Insider Intelligence in 2012.
When industry is the primary audience, the priorities for reporters can be different from those of mainstream journalists. Ferdous Al-Faruque, who goes by Danny, works for Medtech Insight, an industry trade outlet published by the British company Informa. “A large part of our audience are medical device companies. So their regulatory officers, their CEOs [and] various executives will read our stuff in order to know what is FDA thinking, what is FDA doing, how does this impact our business,” he told me. “The way I always try to remember this is if my articles are not, in some way, making money for the medical device industry, I’m not doing my job because what I write needs to somehow fill their business strategy.” He stressed, though, that the approach doesn’t guarantee favorable coverage. “Even though we might lose a major client because they don’t like what we write … we have to do it because it’s not about them,” he says. “It’s about our credibility.”
Some observers argue that the growing ranks of the trade press do contribute, albeit indirectly, to broader accountability journalism. At an Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in August, Usher and her colleague Yee Man Margaret Ng presented their research on social-media conversations between trade journalists in D.C. “What these trade folks are doing, especially on Twitter, is raising [the] alarm when [an] alarm needs to be raised,” Usher told me. “Or they’re covering something in a way that allows more mainstream … journalists to basically survey a sector they would otherwise not pay attention to.”
Members of the US Camel Corps in the southwestern desert, 1857. (MPI/Getty Images & Random House)
Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,042 words)
Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife casts quite the shadow. It was a National Book Awards Finalist, won the Orange Prize, and landed its 25-year-old author on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. We’d understand if Obreht let the acclaim go to her head. We’d even forgive a sophomore slump. Fortunately for us, her novel Inlandbears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor.
While Tiger’s Wife drew from Obreht’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, Inland is set a world apart and a century earlier. Namely: the American West, spanning the second half of the 1800s. Parallel narratives follow Nora, a homesteader in the Arizona territories, and Lurie, an outlaw wanderer and conscripted “cameleer” in the U.S. Camel Corps. (An actual troop, and the novel’s genesis.)
As you’d expect, life is punishing and violence ever-present. The well at Nora’s farm has run dry, and her husband Emmett, the local newspaperman, has left to find water; her two grown sons soon follow. Nora is left to protect and watch over an invalid mother, her youngest son, and an annoying teen ward who conducts séances in town. Lurie also communes with the dead, absorbing the posthumous “want” of his partners-in-crime as he traverses the territories. An immigrant Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, Lurie is also a wanted man, pursued by a dogged marshal on a charge for manslaughter. For much of the book Lurie takes cover in the camel corps — led by a charming Turk named Hadji Ali — and bonds with his trusty camel Burke.
Lurie’s and Nora’s stories will intersect, a meeting which elevates Inland to something spectacular and timeless. It’s cliché to say a book has “reinvented” a genre. But Obreht’s achievement feels that way: like a full reset of the American Western. Its characters are those often ignored in cowboy tales, and the Camel Corps spotlights a little-known piece of history while exemplifying the Why not? spirit of possibility — possibly the oldest American tradition. I asked Obreht about her novel over caffeinated cocktails in Manhattan. Read more…
Robert Macfarlane’s writings exist in a liminal, twilit place where language and landscape dissolve into one another. He writes vividly about outdoor spaces, borders, and the way in which one type of territory transforms subtly into another. And, as befits a writer who’s conscious of how the act of writing influences the spaces he’s writing about, he’s made language itself central to much of his work. His 2015 book Landmarks, for example, meanders through the long-lost definitions of a massive array of terms that were once used to describe very specific parts of the landscape; their loss is to some extent due to humanity having become increasingly urban, but also speaks to larger questions about our alienation from the world around us.
Macfarlane’s work is often focused on very particular places, while the greater issues he raises are universal. His new book, Underland, descends into a quite literally overlooked landscape: the one beneath our feet. He chronicles journeys to isolated caves, the man-made caverns below cities, and scientific research facilities whose underground isolation is essential to their mission. Underland reflects Macfarlane’s continued interest in language, but the nature of time is also a running theme within the book. What does it mean to enter a subterranean space that hasn’t been viewed by human eyes in thousands of years? What does it mean to create a space that may exist long after today’s civilizations have vanished? Throughout this book, Macfarlane wrestles with grand questions about humanity and its effects on the natural world. Even as he proceeds into hidden and obscured spaces, his concerns are deeply human. Read more…
“One bad thing about me is that I don’t give a shit about the environment.” That’s what I told my smart, edgy friend when we were walking to get coffee one day. I admitted that I suck at recycling, and that what I care about is workers, “not like, being vegan and shit.”
“Yea fuck those bumper stickers with the panda on them,” she replied.
The truth is I didn’t think those worries were for me, the type of planning and research it takes to be green. That was a concern for people living a different quality of life, people who carried around large glass bottles filled with distilled water, ladies in lululemon pants who consistently applied Burt’s bees lip balm, ate cacao energy balls, and drove hybrid vehicles. No, caring about the planet was off limits for me. Read more…
Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of those, maybe ten would be artistically interesting. Maybe one would astonish.
This record had been sent to Louviere by a collector, but still, his expectations weren’t high. The group was a duo, Donnie and Joe Emerson. The cover featured a studio portrait of them: teenagers with feathered brown hair, faces dappled with acne, sincere eyes meeting the camera. They were posed against the swirly blue backdrop you’d see in a school photo, with the album’s title—Dreamin’ Wild—written above them in red bubble script. Both boys were dressed flamboyantly in matching spread-collared white jumpsuits, like the outfit Evel Knievel wore vaulting over Snake River Canyon, though the jumpsuits had name patches on the chest, like a mechanic’s work shirt, an odd counter to the attempt at showbiz slickness. Donnie, posed in the front, held a Les Paul and looked a little stoned.
Madison Davis |The Common| December 2018 | 31 minutes (6,125 words)
We are driving through downtown Columbus, away from the Greyhound station. I spent fifteen hours on a bus traveling from New York City to visit for Christmas, a holiday, my mother reminds me, that is not even about Jesus anymore. This is a thought she has reiterated over the years, yet it never prevented her from partaking in the holiday during my lifetime. The absence of a decorative tree and gifts reflected a lack of money, not a rejection of the commodification of religion.
As kids, we were encouraged to list our wishes for Santa, and even now in a post-Christian adulthood, I fantasize about the relief a Christmas miracle would provide. Because I have just a few weeks to come up with eight thousand dollars in order to register for spring classes. The most obvious resolution would be that I take the semester off, move back to Ohio, work hard, and live frugally so I can save enough money to return in the fall. But I know that the likelihood of returning to school after a long break is small, because most who leave do not return.
Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.
When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.
Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.
So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.
Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”
By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.
Michael Blair Mount 
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