How a large-scale effort to register black voters led to a crackdown in Tennessee

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Registering while black.

David Fahrenthold Retweeted

“The state’s top elections official, a former Republican lawmaker named Mark Goins, called the crush of applications [from African American voters] and the errors they contained a ‘dangerous’ situation for others who were ‘properly’ trying to register.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-a-large-scale-effort-to-register-black-voters-led-to-a-crackdown-in-tennessee/2019/05/24/9f6cee1e-7284-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html …

Link to tweet

Politics
How a large-scale effort to register black voters led to a crackdown in Tennessee

By Amy Gardner, National political reporter
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. They walked the parking lots of grocery stores and laundromats, stood outside church services, and cajoled revelers on party buses and at nightclubs. ... By October, the Tennessee Black Voter Project took credit for turning in more than 90,000 voter registration applications — what organizers hoped would be a first step in a broader effort to get more African Americans to be a regular force in elections.

But the surge of forms that landed in the months before Election Day was chaotic and consuming, according to officials in the state’s two largest counties, which include Memphis and Nashville. Thousands of applications had errors or omissions, they said, and their workers were overwhelmed by the task of verifying all the forms. ... The state’s top elections official, a former Republican lawmaker named Mark Goins, called the crush of applications and the errors they contained a “dangerous” situation for others who were “properly” trying to register.

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. ... “We want to provide for fair, for genuine — for elections with integrity,” Republican Gov. Bill Lee said when he signed the bill on May 2.

The new law, which will take effect Oct. 1 unless the courts intervene, imposes penalties of up to $2,000 for each county where an organization with paid workers submits more than 100 deficient forms. The fine gets much steeper — up to $10,000 per county — where the number of deficient forms exceeds 500.
....

The new law has prompted two federal lawsuits accusing Tennessee of voter suppression. ... “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.”

[Voter registration groups sue to block Tennessee law with tough penalties for sign-up mistakes ]
....

Anu Narayanswamy and Alice Crites in Washington and Brandon Gee in Nashville contributed to this report.

Amy Gardner joined The Washington Post in 2005. She has worked stints in the Virginia suburbs, covered the 2010 midterms and the tea party revolution, and covered the Republican presidential nominating contest in 2011-2012. She was a politics editor for five years and returned to reporting in 2018. Follow https://twitter.com/AmyEGardner

[dchill]

1. So "properly" means "whitely?"

Guessing.