How a criminal investigation in Georgia set an ominous tone for African-American voters via jonward11
QUITMAN, Ga. — Nancy Dennard was in a festive holiday mood when police arrived at her front door in the early morning of Dec. 21, 2010.
“They thought they could make an example out of me, and that would kill the spirit of this movement,” said Dennard, who has a master’s degree in speech pathology, as well as an educational doctorate. “I knew we had done nothing wrong.” Story continuesThe Quitman case was the first major investigation under Kemp during his time as secretary of state, and it set a tone for his tenure. It also provided fodder for Republicans around the country who argued that voter fraud is a significant problem, despite a lack of evidence of any widespread or large-scale examples.
It’s incidents like these that prompted Stacey Abrams, when she ran for governor against Kemp in 2018, to say during their debate that “voter suppression isn’t only about blocking the vote, it’s also about creating an atmosphere of fear.” In 2010, a marker was erected by the Mary Turner Project — a group created to remember Turner and to advocate for social justice in the local community — at the spot where she is believed to have been killed. In the few years since then, the plaque — made out of a heavy metal material — has been shot at by those who apparently resent the memory of that history. There are 13 bullet holes in all, matching the number of known victims in the century-old rampage.
Dennard was born in Quitman, but spent the first decade of her life living on military bases. Her father, an enlisted Navy man, ran a disciplined household. The family had dinner at 5 p.m. and abided by strict rules. No hats were allowed in the house. Dennard’s father also stressed the importance of education, and of speaking up for one’s self.
Then as a young professional, Dennard spent two years working in Calhoun, a northern part of Georgia where she was the only person of color in the entire county school system. “The only black person I would see was a black guy on the back of a garbage truck,” she said. Dennard moved back to the area to help her ailing mother, and by 2000 she had spent about a decade living in Quitman but working in schools in neighboring counties. It was only when she took a job in the Brooks County school system that year that she began “looking at the structure of who was making the decisions.” Dennard said she thought the African-American community in Brooks County had no representatives in key positions.
And she also began to home in on the possibility of using absentee ballots as a game-changing tactic. The Republican-controlled state legislature had changed the law in 2005 to make it easier to do, easing some restrictions around it, at a time when the GOP relied more on the practice. But Dennard co-opted the tactic, and on her third try, in a special election for a school board seat in the spring of 2009, she prevailed.
Thomas’s sister, Lula Smart, was an active volunteer who embraced the work of campaigning. “At first it was just a fun thing for us. I was meeting people and sitting down to talk to people. You had elderly people who couldn’t get out to vote and didn’t know they could do absentee ballots,” Smart said.
Boone pointed the finger at Smart as one of the most active organizers. He told the investigators that Smart had told him she was helping voters with their absentee ballots, because “I got to help my black people.” Sansberry followed Dennard and her campaign manager, Kechia Harrison, around Quitman and took photo and video surveillance. He later told GBI investigators, according to their report, that he had been “trying to watch them but … he could not watch them all.”
The next day in the election, black turnout tripled from the previous two midterm elections, going up to 1,461 votes. That was more than the 1,259 whites who voted in the Democratic primary. Troutman and Thomas both won. Absentee ballots made the difference. Three days later, investigators from Kemp’s secretary of state office met with GBI agents in Thomasville, 30 minutes west of Quitman, to discuss an investigation into the Brooks County election.
In the meantime, the two white Democrats who had lost to Thomas and Troutman in the Democratic primary — Mayra Exum and Gary Rentz — got permission from a circuit judge to run again in the fall general election as write-in candidates. The decision ignored a sore-loser law in the state that usually prevents candidates from running in the same election twice.
But in reality, Kemp’s investigators, working with the GBI, had conducted most of their 400 interviews by this point, and were nearing a decision to bring charges against the black Quitman organizers. “The one great thing about our country is that we have a democratic society,” Mulholland said. “There’s not much difference between us and a socialist network or tyrannical country when you start talking about ballot corruption.”
Prosecutors based these charges on a few things. Some voters told investigators that they received assistance in filling out their ballot from one of the Quitman 10+2. Assistance was vaguely defined, and most of these people said they were simply given help to vote the way they wanted, according to the notes taken by investigators and included in the documents obtained by Yahoo News.
“Sometimes they would actually interfere with the ballot itself either by marking it or by helping the person mark it, and in Georgia you’re only allowed to do that if you’re a family member,” he said on Fox. Yet the state held on to the case, and offered a series of plea deals to the Quitman 10+2, according to Dennard.
In the meantime, then-Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal removed Thomas, Troutman and Dennard from the Brooks County school board in January 2012, two months after the indictments were filed. Dennard had been voted president of the board but was stripped of that title as well. Smart fell into despair during this period. “I was actually thinking about killing myself,” she said. “I thought, ‘If I just commit suicide, this will be over for Diane and them.’”
Briones pointed in particular to two people — Johnnie F. Parker and Alice Hollis — who signed complaint forms on Election Day. Both said they had voted for Thomas on an absentee ballot at Smart’s instructions, but hadn’t voted the rest of the ballot and wanted to do so.
It wasn’t until this point that the state elections board, chaired by Kemp, finally closed the Quitman case for good. The board had been holding it open, even after Smart’s acquittal, with the possibility that it might recommend more criminal proceedings. The board quietly dismissed the case in a barely noticeable vote at a June 28 meeting.
Almost a decade after the election that first sparked the Quitman investigation, those involved have moved on with their lives, though several still said they were bitter over how the case played out. The Quitman 10+2 said there has never been an apology or restitution from the local or state officials who pushed the case forward. “I do feel like I’m owed an apology. I really do,” said Smart, who now works at Home Depot.
Kemp, who spent eight years as secretary of state, has seen his political future soar — in part, according to his critics, by suppressing the minority vote. In the 2018 gubernatorial election, Kemp ran as the Republican candidate while also overseeing the election as secretary of state. His Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, called him an “architect of voter suppression,” and her allies said Kemp erected an “obstacle course” of hurdles to voting for poor people and minorities in Georgia.
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