I’ve spent decades fighting for fair elections. Trump is setting the stage for a grim November | David Walbert

Following the supreme court’s gutting of the voting rights act, the president’s recent claims of fraud are cause for serious concernThe first case I argued in the supreme court was in 1982. I represented African American voters from Burke county, Georgia, where no Black person had ever been elected to office even though 40% of the voters were Black. The reason was simple. All candidates were elected at large by the voters of the entire county, and the white majority could outvote Black voters every time.Federal law banned many older methods of southern discrimination–the bogus literacy tests, “understanding” tests, and poll taxes, for example – but structural barriers like the one in Burke county were pervasive, and they suppressed Black politics across the south. In Georgia, fewer than one percent of the elected officials in the state were African Americans while more than a quarter of the state’s registered voters were Black. Continue reading...