Last week a federal district judge found direct evidence that the political machine in Noxubee County, Miss., had discriminated against voters with the intent to infringe their rights and that “these abuses have been racially motivated.”
Among the abuses catalogued by Judge Tom Lee were the paying of notaries public to visit voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, manipulation of the registration rolls, importation of illegal candidates to run for county office, and publication of a list of voters, classified by race, who might have their ballots challenged. The judge criticized state political officials for being “remiss” in addressing the abuses. The U.S. Justice Department, which sued Noxubee officials under the Voting Rights Act, has called conditions there “the most extreme case of racial exclusion seen by the [department’s] Voting Section in decades.”
Read the whole thing. We keep hearing that this sort of thing doesn’t happen nowadays, but John Fund has done an excellent job of demonstrating that it still does. You can listen to our podcast interview with Fund on the topic right here.