Not in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
[A] Plain Dealer analysis shows that, in Cuyahoga County at least, the elections board distributed machines equally to city and suburban polling locations.The long lines at some locations appear to be more the result of timing, new voters and overwhelmed poll workers, not necessarily a shortage of machines.
Before the Nov. 2 election, the elections board allotted each Cleveland precinct one machine for every 117 registered voters within its boundaries - the same ratio of machines that suburban precincts received.
In other words, the more registered voters a particular precinct had, the more machines it received, regardless of where that precinct was.
And in the end, the busiest precincts - when measured by the number of ballots cast per machine - were actually in the suburbs, not Cleveland, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of records from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
Countywide, voters cast an average of nearly 71 ballots on each of the county's 8,000 machines. In Cleveland alone, voters cast an average of 62 ballots per machine. In the suburbs, the average was 74.
And likewise, the Columbus Dispatch reported that in Franklin County the busiest precincts were the suburban ones.
In fact, many polling places in inner-city neighborhoods had fewer voting machines than during the last presidential election.Even so, the busiest places to vote — as measured by the number of ballots cast per machine — were overwhelmingly in suburban areas, according to an analysis by The Dispatch.
...
Nearly half of Franklin County’s 146 wards had fewer machines than four years ago. Generally, the machines were shifted from city wards to suburban ones, following population swings."We have the same number of machines, but they had to be spread over more precincts," Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said.
So keep this in mind when you're told that people were disenfranchised because their precinct had fewer machines than in 2000 - They had fewer machines because other precincts gained more voters.