Vigilantes Are Intimidating Voters
Billy Wooten has been running elections in Georgia’s Chatham County for about 25 years. First, as a poll worker; then as a trainer for other poll workers; and now as the county’s board of elections supervisor.
For the most part, his instructions for the 15 or so poll workers who showed up for an October 14 orientation weren’t that different from years past: He always explains how to work the technology, how to respond when a voter shows up at the incorrect polling location, and what to do with the bags of ballots at the end of election night. But increasingly, Wooten, 67, has had to supplement his training with tips on how to respond to election-integrity skeptics, and especially the ones who have signed up to become poll watchers.
“Some people might decide they’re gonna be trouble.”
While the statewide audit ultimately showed no change in the outcome of the election, pro-Trump activists still attempted to badger Wooten’s workers.
Well, some of his workers.
As the team broke for lunch and headed for the parking lot where the election deniers were marching, “the white poll workers were told, ‘Enjoy your lunch,’” recalls Wooten, “and the Black workers were asked, ‘Were you still stealing votes?’”
It’s a tale as old as the nation itself. For over a century, agitators have attempted to interfere in fair elections, especially through attempted disenfranchisement of Black people.
While the United States ratified the 15th Amendment, enshrining Black mens’ right to vote, in 1870, it was far from a guarantee they could cast a ballot unscathed. In 1920, for example, a white mob repeatedly ordered Black men in Ocoee, Florida, to leave the voting precinct. When one Black man returned to the polls, a large group of white men—including members of the Ku Klux Klan—killed several Black men (historical accounts range somewhere between six and 60).
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/11/poll-watchers-election-armed-vigilantes/
