After the last election in Post 5 in Fayette County, I attended a Board of Elections meeting, called because of complaints by the African American community.
There was a majority of African Americans that attended the meeting. Evidently the white people have no problem with the way the elections are run in Fayette County. Most of the complaints were for the poll officials trying to correct violations of voting laws.
I realize these people are from Fulton and DeKalb and Clayton counties where they don’t pay any attention to voting laws anyway. But in the 30 years I have lived in this county, we have had orderly legal elections.
It seems we didn’t start having problems until the African Americans segregated themselves in one district under the direction of the NAACP. Over the years I had seen hundreds of African Americans in voting lines with no problems at all in my precinct.
All of a sudden people don’t want to obey the rules. How hard is it to understand you don’t campaign within 150 feet of a polling place or hanging out or obstructing access to a polling place. Campaigning is wearing a hat or tee shirt with a candidate’s name on it. You don’t sit in your car making records of who voted without authorization from the Board of Elections.
The NAACP lawyer made a charge that an Angela Bean supporter was waving a Confederate flag at a polling place. He claimed to have a picture of it. Well, as it turns out, it was an American flag, but the Democrats don’t think too much of the American flag either.
If he had a picture as he claimed why didn’t he show it? Everybody has a phone camera in their pocket and the person was there for hours, with the flag. You could have gotten the Justice Department there in that time. You don’t take pictures in a polling place either.
For some of the solutions to the problems, the NAACP suggested that you take the voting areas out of the churches because they weren’t anything but white people’s churches anyway.
That would be news to some of the churches in the neighborhood I know of, especially the one I attend occasionally.
Could that request be more of the Democrat Party’s war on religion?
In either case you could put the polling place in a one-room block building in the middle of a 40-acre field and it would not stop these types of violations.
It seems we only have these problems in the 5th district where the African Americans have segregated themselves. The problems appear to be deliberate in the 5th district and inadvertently in the rest of the county. The rest of the county doesn’t really have these problems.
For the first time I know of we have to have poll watchers and if the NAACP knew what they were doing they would have gone to the proper officials and gotten their own poll watchers.
These are petty crimes in voting violations, but it starts somewhere because according to the sheriff’s numbers, in the 5th district, we have the highest crime rate in the county.
I am quite sure I will be accused of being racist for this letter, but white people are used to being called racist for any reason. If the people in the 5th district want to run their elections like Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton counties, then go ahead. I can vote in early voting and I have all the confidence in the rest of the county having orderly legal elections.
W. H. Pool
Fayetteville, Ga.
