Claims about illegal votes targeted predominantly Black cities and voters

Evidence

No one has ever accused Donald Trump of being subtle, but even for him, this was blatant. Atlanta is 51 percent Black; Detroit, 78 percent. Philadelphia is 42 percent Black, and Milwaukee has a Black population of just under 39 percent. So-called illegal votes were, in actuality, just Black votes. This wasn’t about election integrity; it was about casting Black voters as politically illegitimate. As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in its lawsuit representing a group of Michigan voters against the Trump campaign, “Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 620

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core reframing argument that Black political legitimacy has been contested at every American founding moment — voter suppression as continuity from slavery’s disenfranchisement. — connects to: Literacy tests and poll taxes were written to let local officials disenfranchise black voters — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2063
• SEED: Worth developing as a passage in an essay about how ‘election integrity’ rhetoric functions as a racial-coded idiom of political illegitimacy, paralleling older disenfranchisement tactics.