One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

by Carol Anderson

The Perry County district attorney cried foul! He was convinced that Turner and company had committed fraud. The DA quickly informed US attorney Jeff Sessions, who hated the VRA, considering it a meddling piece of legislation. When the next primary rolled around in 1984, Sessions had the FBI tail the Turners and Stephen Hogue. After the trio mailed hundreds of absentee ballots they had collected, the agents seized the ballots, and, after picking through them, believed they had identified seventy-five that had been tampered with. Sessions then identified the victims of the alleged voter fraud, moved them south to Mobile, and interviewed them there. Note that in his investigations, Sessions targeted only counties where blacks had won office.