LeMoyne-Owen College student Franky Mills collects high-fives from fellow students during a get-out-the-vote drive at an early-voting location in Memphis on Nov. 1. By Amy Gardner Amy Gardner National political reporter Email Bio Follow May 24 at 7:50 AM Last year, an army of paid workers with stacks of voter registration forms fanned out in Memphis, Nashville and other parts of Tennessee to persuade African Americans to vote.
He proposed a solution that went further than any other state in the nation: imposing civil penalties on groups that employ paid canvassers if they submit incomplete or inaccurate voter registration forms. There is no definitive account of what exactly went wrong in Tennessee last year. Republicans, who control all arms of the government — including the state and county election commissions — did not formally investigate the matter before moving to pass the new law. As a result, there is no official account of how many applications were faulty, the source of the problems and whether the Tennessee Black Voter Project was to blame.
“They have created more administrative hurdles to make it harder to vote,” said Charlane Oliver, a co-founder of the Equity Alliance, one of the partners of the Tennessee Black Voter Project. “And that’s exactly what they want. They don’t want black people to vote.”Through a spokeswoman, Goins and his boss, Secretary of State Tre Hargett, declined requests for interviews, citing ongoing litigation. The office of Lee, the governor, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
As the state’s Oct. 9 registration deadline approached, Phillips said thousands of forms were submitted. “We were working 12- to 18-hour shifts,” Phillips recalled. “At one point I and my supervisors didn’t have a day off for 45 days. The burden that it placed on us literally was going to prevent us from doing our job. I thought my assistant was going to crawl under her desk and sob.”
Oliver said the Tennessee Black Voter project had sought guidance ahead of time from local election officials and warned them of the volume of forms coming. “It became a situation where it was very dangerous for other individuals who were properly trying to register, because we were so backlogged,” Goins told lawmakers.Republican state Rep. Tim Rudd, one of the bill’s sponsors, repeated the claim that some drives were paying canvassers by the form when he introduced the bill in a committee hearing in March. “So they were just signing people up and flooding them,” he said. “So this is an effort to clean that up.
I don’t t trust anybody on any side when it comes to voting. Purge every single person from voter rolls. Everybody has to re-register&show passport or birth certificate/photo ID&proof of where you live. Then govt photoID when voting. Problem solved let chips fall where they may.
2 things white supremacists don't like: POC with guns or voting rights.