by Ruth A. Sheets
Last evening I watched a documentary, “Vigilante, Inc,” a film by Greg Palast. It was a story of the racism, fearmongering, and unamerican behavior of people, mostly Republicans in Georgia whose efforts are designed to stop people of color from voting. The mostly white legislature passed bills to let any citizen challenge any voters on the rolls, as many as they wish, without even a legitimate reason, and Governor Kemp signed it into law. Kemp is a major proponent of this voter suppression project.
In addition to purging the voter rolls, the voter suppression team uses fear and intimidation to silence anyone who questions this clearly unconstitutional project. The ultimate goal seems to be to get county election boards to refuse to certify elections if the candidate who won was not the person the governor and his buddies want to win, including for President of the United States. This is just the modern version of the well-practiced KKK voter-suppression of yore.
Gov. Kemp has been using his various positions to reinstate the old Jim Crow laws, referred to by Black leaders as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Kemp regularly does and says things that are pure racism and has no shame in doing it. He does claim this voter purge is for the good of the state but his explanation is lacking.
in the film, I learned that Brian Kemp’s family was one of the largest landowners in Georgia. He uses their land for his own personal gain no matter how it harms the state or its communities. His family’s wealth was built on the labor of enslaved persons. At first, slavery was illegal in Georgia, but one of Kemp’s ancestors forced slavery into Georgia and it shaped the Georgia economy for generations. A descendant of the first enslaved people in Georgia commented, “if you suppress the history, you suppress the vote,” and suppressing history of everyone but white men is on the chopping block in Georgia and numerous other states and so is voter suppression.
Through this disturbing but important film, one can see that white supremacists have decided that attacking, intimidating, threatening, even killing Black people and other people of color, young folks, and their allies are mostly successful tactics they can use to maintain their power and to keep certain people from voting. Purging the voting rolls and arresting people who help citizens vote are also powerful suppressors.
“True the Vote” is a master mind for the Vigilante movement. They originate in Texas but have whipped up MAGAs all over the country, getting them to believe they had the right to attack voters as non-citizens, criminals, or with no stated excuse at all. The group has signed up 40,000 vigilante volunteers monitoring potential voters of color and young people, getting names and addresses to challenge their right to vote. Once Vigilantiism gets started, there are scared white people desperate for attention who will jump in to do their party’s bidding. They choose names that sound Black or Hispanic or Asian, and claim those people are “illegal aliens” or some other such nonsense since lying is acceptable in this project. They get a thrill and get away with it because they are white, mostly women. Those women seem especially vulnerable to the Republican Lying and blaming. In some districts, law enforcement is being used to intimidate voter registration programs, confiscating equipment, arresting the workers, etc., all of which are unconstitutional unless one believes “free speech” is only for Republicans.
For me, there is no excuse for challenging voters and denying them the right to vote. Voter registration should be automatic from the moment a citizen turns 18 and the registration should be till death. Only change of address or political party should affect voter registration. Our Constitution says everyone has the right to vote. If our courts actually had decent people serving, people who understand the requirement of our Constitution, little to none of this bad behavior on the part of Republicans would be permitted, but even our Supreme Court Republican majority won’t stand with our Constitution. That is truly scary. It would help if all of us who are not brainwashed into the Trump/Kemp cult would stand up and call out the efforts of the purgers, those anti-American actors who would deny their fellow citizens the sacred right to vote in our democracy.
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