Mail-in voting restrictions and polling cuts disproportionately targeted Black voters

Evidence

Even before the election, the president and his allies had tried to suppress so-called illegal votes. In September, his attorney general, William Barr, falsely alleged that mail-in voting—which for many Americans was a necessity in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic—was “fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion,” incorrectly citing a 2005 commission report on voting from James Baker and former president Jimmy Carter. Robocalls from unidentified groups in Michigan warned residents that mail-in voting could leave their personal information in the hands of the police. In Georgia, voting officials slashed the number of polling places in majority-Black precincts even as the number of voters surged. After Trump lost, with the majority of mail-in ballots going to his opponent, his campaign argued that illegal voting had been particularly rampant in a few cities within the states that had determined the election: Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 619

Categorization

• XREF: 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; Expanding black voting instantly reversed white officials’ refusal of black demands — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 84