Register Minority Voters in Georgia, Go to Jail

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121715/georgia-secretary-state-hammers-minority-voter-registration-efforts

By Spencer Woodman
May 5, 2015

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Quitman, a town of fewer than 4,000 people, sits in Brooks County, Georgia, ten short miles to the Florida state line. In 2010—for the first time in the county’s history—the county elected a majority-black school board. This upset victory followed a sudden surge in local black voting that was catalyzed by a group of get-out-the-vote activists.

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For weeks after the historic primary, Kemp’s armed investigators, along with officials from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, went door-to-door in Quitman’s black neighborhoods. Without evidence of actual voter fraud in Quitman, the state’s case against the town’s voting activists came to rely on allegations of less glaring breaches of absentee ballot procedure.

Echoing Kemp’s investigation into AALAC, many accusations against those in Quitman focused on voting organizers improperly possessing voters' materials. (The Quitman investigation was spurred by a local district attorney with strong enough connections to the county's white school board members that he could not work on the case.)

State agents arrested a dozen voting organizers, three of whom had won seats on the county school board. With the charges pending, Georgia’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, issued an executive order temporarily removing those women from their posts, reinstating the county’s white-majority school board.

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Another Quitman resident, Debra Dennard, faced two felony charges of voter fraud for helping her father fill out his absentee ballot. Her father, David Dennard, is missing both legs and is partially blind. Mr. Dennard says that with his daughter’s assistance he voted for just who he wanted to without any coercion or meddling. “All she did was help me—just as she helps me with almost everything,” the father told me last year. “I knew who I wanted to vote for, and I signed the ballot myself.”

At the first of Lula Smart’s three trials, Quitman resident Bessie Hamilton testified that one of Kemp’s investigators came to the doctor's office where she worked, took her into an unused break room, and intimidated her into signing a statement against Smart. “I was scared,” she said on the stand. “This man came to my job with a gun, and on top of that, he told me I could have went to jail.”

Last September—four years after the election in question—a jury in Quitman cleared Lula Smart on every count against her. This past December, the state dropped all of its remaining charges against the group. A dozen arrests netted not a single conviction or plea deal in Quitman. (One member of the group died in 2012.)

But the damage to those targeted in Quitman was already done. Quitman resident Sandra Cody told me that, last November, she and another member of the group were removed from their longtime Head Start teaching jobs because of the pending voting charges. “They said were not supposed to be around children,” Cody said, “because we have this on our record.”

Although the charges were dropped weeks after their removal, bureaucratic red tape delayed their return to those jobs until February. Cody told me that, in addition to the years of stress resulting from the now-dismissed felony charges, she fell behind on her rent and utility bills because of the loss of work.

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