Arrested for Helping Their Neighbors Vote

In a rural Georgia town, twelve Black educators, organizers, and local leaders were arrested, and thrown in jail.

Their crime? Helping neighbors vote.

This is the story of the Quitman 10+2 – and how one local crackdown foreshadowed national voter suppression efforts like the SAVE Act and Project 2025.

Nancy Dennard began working for Brooks County schools in 2000, where she saw firsthand how a nearly 60% white county had a school board with virtually no Black representation. After losing elections to join the school board in 2004 and 2008, she broke through in a 2009 special election by organizing her community and turning out mail voters.

Then she helped two fellow Black educators, Diane Thomas and Linda Troutman, win seats of their own – despite efforts to undermine them, including a court decision allowing two white Democrats who had lost the primary to re-enter the race in the general election.

It was a quiet revolution: three Black women flipping a white-majority school board in deeply segregated South Georgia.

It should have been celebrated. Instead, it triggered a crackdown.

The Backlash

Twelve Black residents – including Dennard, Thomas, and Troutman – were arrested, handcuffed, and charged with a combined 120 felony counts. The state accused them of improperly assisting voters, a routine act of civic support. The charges carried possible prison sentences of up to 10 years. The most common charge was “illegal possession of a ballot,” often for something as simple as helping a willing voter drop off their completed, sealed mail ballot at the mailbox.

The case dragged on for years. Not one person was convicted. Not one took a plea. All were either acquitted or never tried due to lack of evidence. One of the accused died before trial. Another considered suicide. Others lost jobs and community standing.

Governor Nathan Deal temporarily suspended the elected Black school board members–and appointed white replacements, immediately restoring a white majority on the board. In fall 2014, Ms. Troutman and Ms. Thomas, still under indictment, were both defeated in their reelection bids, and the board flipped back to majority white control.

It was Jim Crow for the 21st century – and it didn’t stop in Quitman.

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Brian Kemp’s War on Voters

The Quitman arrests weren’t a one-off. They were a test case.

Soon after, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp began targeting civic engagement groups across Georgia. In 2012, attorney Helen Ho flagged that newly naturalized citizens weren’t appearing on Georgia’s voter rolls. Instead of investigating the issue, Secretary of State Brian Kemp launched an investigation into her nonprofit that worked to register voters.

Kemp’s office spent over two years investigating the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center for copying voter registration forms – a standard, legal practice. The probe found no wrongdoing.

At the same time, Kemp’s office opened investigations into other organizations working to register Black and Brown voters across the state. He was even caught on tape warning Republican leaders: “Democrats are working hard registering all these minority voters… If they can do that, they can win.”

The message was clear: if you empower voters of color, we’ll come after you.

The Playbook Goes National

After Trump lost in 2020, the voter suppression playbook didn’t disappear – it spread nationwide. But this playbook wasn’t new. It was almost 15 years in the making, with influence from places like Quitman.

The Heritage Foundation – which took credit for Georgia’s SB 202 and Texas’s SB 1 – is now spearheading Project 2025, a plan to consolidate federal power under Trump. Texas’ bill even cited “purity of the ballot box,” a Jim Crow-era phrase, to justify new voting restrictions.

Now, Trump and anti-voter groups are trying to pass the SAVE Act, which would bury voter registration under mountains of government red tape – especially for Black and Brown citizens and married women. The bill would effectively eliminate mail and online registration and third-party voter registration drives, and require voters to present specific, expensive government documents in person to register. It would gut tools most relied on by Black communities to access the ballot. In essence, it would criminalize community voter assistance, similar to Quitman 10+2.

Trump also wants to empower the Department of Justice to prosecute state and local election officials – part of a larger trend. A leaked DOJ memo explored ways to criminally charge local election officials. And Project 2025 openly calls for using a Reconstruction-era law, originally meant to protect Black voters, as a weapon to prosecute the very people running our elections.

In Georgia, the playbook is already law. Now governor, Kemp signed SB 202 into law while seated under a painting of a Georgia plantation – a scene as symbolic as the bill itself. And Kemp made the reason for SB 202 explicitly clear during a Republican primary debate when he ran for reelection in 2022, saying he was "frustrated" that Democrats won in 2020 and "did something about it with SB 202."

SB 202 gave the legislature near-total control over appointments to the State Election Board, allowing Trump-aligned MAGA activists to take over and attempt to rewrite election rules before the 2024 election. Their changes conflicted with state law and during their meetings, they resurrected long-debunked lies about 2020. Trump praised the MAGA board members by name at an Atlanta rally.

SB 202 also gave counties the power to cut Sunday early voting – a direct attack on “Souls to the Polls,” a Black church tradition that has powered civic engagement for decades.

Since 2020, at least 1,900 anti-voter laws have been introduced in state legislatures, with 167 of them becoming law. And the Quitman model – criminalization, intimidation, and fear – is alive and well.

The Warning

The story of the Quitman 10+2 isn’t just a chapter from the recent past. It’s a warning.

What happened in one rural Georgia county is now being copy-pasted nationwide: MAGA wants to use similar scare tactics and uses of government authority to silence Black voters.

Brian Kemp’s term as governor may be ending soon. But the blueprint he helped build is still in motion. And if we don’t remember what happened in Quitman – if we don’t organize, speak out, and vote – they’ll keep repeating it until the damage is permanent.

Our voices and our votes have power – let’s fight back.

Fair Fight Team

Paid for by Fair Fight, www.fairfight.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.