Four years ago, two days before that November’s election, Gamaliel Turner, then a U.S. Army major, received a letter from his county elections board in rural Southern Georgia, telling him his right to vote had been challenged.
“You’re telling me, 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,” an emotional Turner, now retired, related his reaction to that board’s summons. So, Turner told documentary filmmaker Greg Palast, he did.
He flew 2,600 miles each way from his post then, which was in Germany, to Fort Benning, Ga., to prove his right to vote by walking into his polling place with ID and casting his ballot in person. He succeeded.
Turner had to make that trip because 88 vigilantes, acting under Republican-passed Georgian voting laws, challenged the voter qualifications of 4,000 soldiers registered at Fort Benning. All, like Turner, who’s the son of a civil rights crusader, were Black.
Now take Turner’s case and multiply it by 851,000 Black and Brown voters from coast to coast, and you have Palast’s film, Vigilantes, Inc., subtitled “America’s new vote repression hitmen.” The film exposes what the racist right is already implementing for this fall’s election, but on a much larger scale than just one county around one big fort in rural Georgia.
“This is no more different than Jim Crow,” Palast says of the racists’ plans. And instead of 88 vigilantes, “They now have thousands.”
The Progressive Democrats of America will air the film on October 9 at 8 pm Eastern Time.
The right-wing challenges to voters of color, young people, and women are important to workers, unions, and their members. The aim of the challengers, from coast to coast, is to knock voters off the rolls. And the voters they’re targeting are more likely than not to support pro-worker laws and causes,
Doing so prevents those voters from casting ballots, or prevents their votes from being counted, all to skew the election to the racist radical right’s champions in general and their god, convicted felon Donald Trump, the white nationalist Republican nominee, in particular.
Palast told PDA that one right-wing group, True The Vote, has already challenged those 851,000 voters.
“Every one of them being challenged has been Black or brown or young. And everyone doing the challenging is a white Republican,” he says.
One challenger, a white woman in Georgia who’s already fingered 32,479 names, is shown berating Palast when he asks her about her efforts—and slamming the door in his face.
And once you’re challenged, the film warns, it’s tough to beat the challenges, as voting qualifications and proof vary from state to state. Georgia is particularly onerous, Palast notes, as “in state law, you can have an unlimited number of challenges” by one foe of voters.
“You can do this on Election Day, you can do this on mail-in votes, or you can even challenge ballots” postmarked on Election Day, November 5, but received afterwards, he says. “You have to know the complex steps to challenge the challengers,” Palast adds.
Fielding comments from PDA members, Palast, and the group’s chair, Alan Minsky, reminded the Zoom crowd that voter registration deadlines are closing. But even after that, they said, voters should double-check with their local election boards to ensure they’re registered and stay that way.
Palast said a number of groups, including Black Voters Matter and Operation Rainbow PUSH, are working to educate voters on how to protect themselves from challenges.
That still leaves one big problem that viewer Dorothy Reik identified and that neither Palast nor Minsky could answer. Those who don’t know they’ve been knocked off the rolls, or who never registered at all, until now.
“The people who are not curious are the victims of all of this,” Riek said.
A trailer for the film is here on YouTube.
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