“We’ve marched too long, we’ve worked too hard, and died too young. Don’t let them steal your vote.” — Rev. Jesse Jackson
In 2020, Georgia Republican party activist Pam Reardon challenged the right of 32,132 of her neighbors to have their ballot counted. Alton Russell, the Republican Party Chairman of Columbus County Georgia personally challenged the right of 4,000 voters to have their ballots counted.
These two GOP activists are not government officials. Rather they are self-appointed vote-fraud hunting vigilantes, using new laws in Georgia by which any voter can challenge an “unlimited” number of voters in their county.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast and his team have gone through their challenge lists and discovered that the voters accused are, disproportionately, Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and young voters. In other words, voters of color. The color: Democratic blue.
Columbus, Georgia is the home of Fort Benning, now called Fort Moore, and the GOP hit list included Black soldiers living near the base such as one of the Pentagon top experts in warfare in the future, 70-year-old MAJ Gamaliel Turner, now retired.
In Palast’s film, Vigilantes Inc., America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, the reporter asks Turner what happened to his vote. The Major had not received his absentee ballot for the 2020 election, so he called the Columbus, Georgia, registrar and asked why.
He was told, “Mr. Turner, you have been challenged.” Then, the county said he could get his ballot if he came into the voter registrar’s office with ID proving citizenship and Georgia address.
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 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,” the old trick used in the South for decades to African-Americans from voting.
Ultimately, Turner had to have his attorney fly from Washington DC to appear in a Georgia courtroom to get his one ballot counted. But the court blocked counting of the ballots of the other 4,000 citizens.
This year, the vigilante challenges of 2020 have spread nationwide, the “virus out of Georgia,” as voting rights attorney Marc Elias calls it.
Here’s the number that should scare you: In 2020 there were 88 vigilante votes challengers, almost all in Georgia. But the group that provided the hit list of voters to challenge, True the Vote of Texas, has proudly proclaimed it has, this year, signed up an astonishing 40,000 vigilantes. True the Vote crows that, as of the beginning of August, they had already challenged over 851,000 voters across the nation.
This is a whole new form of vote suppression, large enough, if unchecked, that could flip the election. Almost all states have an old Jim Crow era law on their books, allowing, like Georgia, any voter to challenge another voter’s ballot.
The challengers are supposed to have solid information that the voter they’ve challenged is not a legally entitled to a ballot. But, in Palast’s film, the Republican activists, who together challenged over 35,000 Americans, admit they did not bother to contact even one of the voters they attacked.
The mass challenge of Black voters is not new. In 1946, the Ku Klux Klan launched a scheme to challenge every African-American voter in Georgia. To cover their tracks — a violation of the 15th Amendment of the Constitution — the Klan incorporated itself as “Vigilantes Inc.” Hence, the name of Palast’s film. Now the Klan plan has become the MAGA plan.
While organizations including RainbowPUSH and the NAACP of Georgia have sued to stop the challenges, it’s time for the Justice Department to step in immediately to make sure every Black soldier, every American, will be able to cast their ballot and have it counted.
Voters, not vigilantes, should choose our President.
If not, we have no right to call ourselves a democracy.
Jesse L. Jackson Sr. is the Founder of the RainbowPUSH Coalition, sponsor of the film, Vigilantes Inc., America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which you can stream without charge at WatchVigilantesInc.com
The Palast crew is in Georgia covering this battleground state.
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The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr., founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, is one of America’s foremost civil rights, religious and political figures. Over the past forty years, he has played a pivotal role in virtually every movement for empowerment, peace, civil rights, gender equality, and economic and social justice. On August 9, 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Reverend Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Reverend Jackson has been called the “Conscience of the Nation” and “the Great Unifier,” challenging America to be inclusive and to establish just and humane priorities for the benefit of all. He is known for bringing people together on common ground across lines of race, culture, class, gender and belief.
Reverend Jackson married his college sweetheart Jacqueline Lavinia Brown in 1963. They have five children: Santita Jackson, Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Jonathan Luther Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Esq., and Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson, Jr.