TPM: Why Jeff Sessions As Attorney General Horrifies Voting Rights Advocates

[highplainsdem]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/why-trump-s-choice-of-jeff-sessions-as-ag-is-alarming-voting-rights-advocates

As a U.S. attorney in Alabama in the mid-1980s, Sessions sought to prosecute African American activists in the state -- including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who was also among those clubbed by police officers in the march for voting rights in Selma -- for allegedly committing voter fraud with absentee ballots. The federal investigators hid behind the bushes outside of a post office to monitor the activists as they sent out about 500 absentee ballots they collected from elderly black voters, according to the Nation. The investigators took down the information from the ballots and tracked down 20 voters. The elderly African Americans were bused 200 miles to be interrogated and to deliver testimony in front of a grand jury, according to a Washington Post report from the time. Of the 1.7 million ballots cast in the election in question, the investigation was only able to turn up 14 allegedly tampered ballots, The New Republic reported.

Sessions brought 29 charges against each of the activists related to fraud and conspiracy, according to the Nation. A jury, in deliberations that lasted only a few hours, acquitted the three activists. Even after, Sessions insisted “there was sufficient evidence for a conviction," the Washington Post reported at the time. The investigation was also knocked by a panel of judges who objected to how investigators numbered absentee ballots after they were mailed so they could collect the voters' information, the AP reported in 1986, though Sessions continued to stand by the practice.

Civil rights groups warned that the probe, despite the acquittals, would have a chilling effect on campaigns to help African Americans vote, according to USA Today.

The episode came up a year later, when the Senate was considering Sessions' 1986 nomination by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. But it was soon eclipsed by allegations that Sessions expressed racist sentiments among his colleagues. Over the course of the hearings related to the controversy, Sessions admitted to calling the NAACP and the National Council of Churches “un-American,” though he denied he had applied the label to the ACLU, as was claimed.

[flamingdem]

1. Obama wants to devote his time to voting issues

so no wonder Sessions was picked..

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

2. Huh?? Not sure what you're sayin.