The Fight Against an Age-Old Effort to Block Americans From Voting

[Nevilledog]

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Sarah Smith
@sarahesmith23
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“How the system is set up, it disenfranchises people. It’s by design, I believe, because they want to maintain that power and that control.”

Incredible story on literacy and voting by @AliyyaSwaby & @AnnieWaldman

propublica.org
The Fight Against an Age-Old Effort to Block Americans From Voting
As a new wave of restrictions makes voting harder for people who struggle to read — now 1 in 5 Americans — people like Olivia Coley-Pearson have taken up the fight, even if it makes her a target.
6:57 AM · Sep 12, 2022

https://www.propublica.org/article/literacy-tests-voting-rights-georgia-election


For nearly 10 hours on Georgia’s primary day, Olivia Coley-Pearson tracked down every potential voter she could find, working two cellphones as she paced the parking lot outside the polls, repeating the same message: “You need to tell all your cousins, your brothers, your sisters, your aunts, your uncles — everybody you know — to come on down here to vote.”

A third of her neighbors in Coffee County struggle to read at a basic level, and she wanted to make sure they had help navigating their ballots. In the late afternoon, she slid behind the sparkly pink steering wheel of her SUV for her final push of the day, heading down a long stretch of road where buildings gave way to fields and thickets of pine. She turned in to the Kinwood Estates mobile home park and stopped at the edge of a familiar dirt driveway just as Shondriana Jones, 30, bounded down the steps of a trailer.

“I can’t find my ID and Mama, she’s still at work,” Jones said.

Coley-Pearson has helped the family vote for years — she’s known them since she and Jones’ mother, Sabrina Fillmore, were young. Now 60, Coley-Pearson serves as a city commissioner in Douglas, the majority-Black county seat. Fillmore, 54, works at the local poultry plant cutting chickens. Neither Fillmore nor her daughter can read beyond a first-grade level, but they rarely miss an election, believing their votes can influence everything from their electricity costs to the way police treat them.

Coley-Pearson urged Jones to track down a utility bill to prove her identity at the election office just as Fillmore returned from a 10-hour shift, exhausted. With the women aboard, Coley-Pearson started the car, anxiety brewing in her mind.

*snip*

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Blessings on those who help people vote! Damnation to those who put up roadblocks. n/t

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. The radicalized Republican party is coming for your rights -- reproductive and voting.

Roe, Roe, Roe your vote
against theocracy!
Republicans revoke your rights
and kill democracy!

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