Pro-Trump Activists Are Using Jim Crow-Era Laws to Disenfranchise Voters

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

Georgia Republican Party activist Pam Reardon challenged the right of 32,132 of her neighbors to have their ballots counted during the 2020 election. Alton Russell, the Republican Party chairman of Columbus, Georgia, personally challenged roughly 4,000 voters’ right to a ballot in 2020.

These two pro-Trump activists are not government officials. They are self-appointed vote fraud hunting vigilantes, using old Jim Crow laws by which any voter can challenge an unlimited number of other voters in their county.

This should scare Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2020, the group organizing the challenges, True the Vote of Texas, fielded 88 vigilantes challenging ballots, all in Georgia. This year, they’ve signed up over 40,000 vigilantes, and proudly proclaimed that as of August, they had already challenged 852,381 voters across the nation, with a goal of 2 million by this Tuesday’s election. And several other vigilante groups, with names like The Pig Pen Project and Election Research Group have jumped into the action, challenging voters in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and other swing states.

Unfortunately, while the NAACP, Black Voters Matter, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and other frontline organizations have sued over these challenges, the U.S. Justice Department is, so far, nowhere to be seen.

I interviewed Republican Chairman Russell in Vigilantes, Inc., the documentary I produced, and he came to our interview actually dressed as Wild West vigilante Doc Holliday, sporting a pearl-handled six-shooter in a holster (which is loaded, he told me).

Russell’s voter hit list was loaded with Black soldiers based at Fort Moore, Georgia. I met with one of those he challenged, career military specialist Maj. Gamaliel Turner. The 70-year-old Black man was temporarily assigned by the military to a naval base in California.

His absentee ballot never arrived. So, he called his local elections officials who told him, “Mr. Turner, you have been challenged.” He’d get his ballot if he came into their office and proved his citizenship and local address, they said.

Turner replied, “So you’re telling me 2,600 miles away, two days or three days before an election, that if I want to vote, all I have to do is show up and prove, as an American citizen, that I have the right to vote? Again?”

For Turner, it was just Jim Crow modernized. “This is no more than a poll tax,” he says, the old trick used in the South for decades to prevent Black people from voting.

The wound was deep. His father, Rev. Harold Turner, was a co-founder with Martin Luther King Jr. of the civil rights organization known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC.

Ultimately, Major Turner had to fly an attorney to Georgia from Washington, D.C. to get his vote counted by order of a federal judge. However, thousands of other citizens lost their vote.

This year, a new law, SB 189, in Georgia makes it easier to challenge voters by extending the challenge period up through and including Election Day, according to Georgia NAACP Chairman Gerald Griggs. In a state where the presidential election may likely be decided, Griggs expects more than 300,000 challenges in Georgia alone.

Now the vigilante virus has spread out of Georgia. Vigilante challenges — totaling in the hundreds of thousands — are exploding across the battleground states.

My nonpartisan investigations team called 800 voters on the True the Vote challenge lists. An overwhelming proportion of the targeted voters were Black — and were surprised to hear that their ballots cannot be counted unless they prove they are citizens.

Mass challenges against Black voters are not new. This tactic was last used in 1946, when the Ku Klux Klan launched a scheme to challenge every Black voter in Georgia. Now the Klan plan has become the MAGA plan.

In 1946, the Klan succeeded in electing one of their own, Eugene Talmadge, as governor of Georgia. The FBI wrote up an indictment to charge Talmadge with criminal violation of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution for denying the right to vote based on a citizen’s skin color. But before he could be handcuffed, Talmadge drank himself to death.

Unfortunately, today, with many courts dominated by Trump appointees, judges are letting these new racist challenges stand.

Trump’s MAGA activists justify the vigilante challenges on grounds with the baseless claim that literally millions of illegal voters are on the voter rolls, including undocumented people and voters who vote several times. The widely debunked conspiracy film 2000 Mules, launched by True the Vote and Trump at Mar-a-Lago and seen by 10 million Trump fanatics, shows Black men supposedly caught on camera criminally stuffing ballot drop boxes.

This is an old trope, taken from the 1915 Klan propaganda film, The Birth of a Nation, which showed a white actor in blackface stuffing an extra vote into a ballot box.

Neither True the Vote nor any other Trump-endorsed vigilante group has, while challenging thousands, identified a single voter to arrest — except one: Mark Andrews. Andrews, who is Black, was in fact dropping off his family’s ballots quite legally — and has sued the distributor of the film to a fare-thee-well. The film’s distributor was forced to apologize, and it pulled the movie from all of its platforms.

Twenty-five years ago, I broke a story with The Guardian that shocked the U.S.: Before the 2000 election, the state of Florida removed tens of thousands of Black men from Florida’s voter rolls. Yet, despite this ugly racial cleansing of the electoral rolls, George W. Bush was declared victorious in Florida (by just 537 votes), and thereby became president.

When I wrote that exposé in 2000, I thought it would be the end of such Jim Crow tactics. But now, as the NAACP’s Griggs says, we are facing “Jim Crow 2.0,” with racist attacks now assisted by AI trickery. For example Cleta Mitchell, Trump’s attorney who was on the infamous call with Trump demanding that the Georgia secretary of state “find” 11,780 ballots, is promoting AI-based software to target voters for vigilante challenges.

I’ve been working with the NAACP, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH and the National Bar Association (an organization of Black lawyers), who are helping tens of thousands of Black Americans navigate the obstacle course that vigilantes have put between these voters and their ballot.

But there is a real danger that, in a nation that promotes itself as the fount of democracy, the vigilantes, not the voters, will choose our president.