Vigilantes Inc.: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen

Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman

In 2018, I was outside a polling station in Atlanta when I met (and captured on film) a 92-year-old woman slowly making her way through the rain in her walker. By her side, her granddaughter, was sobbing hysterically. Christine Jordan had just been tossed from the polls, denied a ballot, on grounds she no longer lived in Georgia.

Christine invited me to her home—the one the state said she’d left—and there was a photo of her at the dining room table decades earlier with her cousin, Martin Luther King.

I was furious. It was personal. My wife is African-American. Would she--and my daughters--be told that they too are fraudulent voters; told to scram?

For a decade, I’ve been working with investigative reporter Greg Palast. Palast is a bit of a berserker. His well-known jump-the-bad guys BBC-TV, Guardian, Rolling Stone reports are infamous—and entertaining. But before the fun on camera begins, I rely on Palast’s academic chops as an economist/statistician (he’s lectured at Cambridge and Harvard)—as an old-fashioned gumshoe detective.

Palast, with foundation help, fielded an expert team that found out that Christine was one of 198,000 Georgians–overwhelmingly voters of color—purged from voter rolls.

We got a break when George DiCaprio offered to produce a short investigative film which we launched from his son Leonardo’s socials. The impact was enormous allowing us, in coordination with LaTosha Brown, founder of Black Voters Matter and Gerald Griggs, head of the state NAACP, to get the word to voters—and even get the law changed.

After 9 years of working with Palast in Georgia and other states, we waited for the next Jim Crow trick. And sure enough, tucked into a new Georgia law, a new “vigilante” provision allowed any self-proclaimed vote fraud hunter to challenge an “unlimited” number of other voters. And boy, did they! We found one GOP operative who personally challenged 32,000 voters.

We called 800 of them—not one an illegal voter. (These are not easy investigations.) Palast, in his inimitable way, showed the vigilante the photos of her Black neighbors whose votes the pol had blocked—and the vigilante, who kept an assault rifle next to the door, chased him out, swearing.

Too many voting rights films are filled with experts in front of book cases. We wanted the information to hit the audience as ENTERTAINMENT—at times great fun, at times truly heartbreaking. (Our last film on voting, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, featured Ed Asner in a Santa Claus suit.)

There’s plenty of heartbreak. One of my rules is that I won’t tell the story of evil-doing without bringing in the victim, the target of official brutalities. That’s not so easy—it’s rare to find people willing to withstand the counter-attacks.

But we found a warrior, ready and willing to stand up: Maj. Gamaliel Turner, career military specialist, whose ballot was blocked by a vigilante—a vigilante who dresses up like…a vigilante, Doc Holliday, with cowboy hat and six-gun. A plan was set in motion.

DiCaprio pushed us to make a feature doc, as did Academy-Award winning documentarian Maria Florio who asked to join as producer. She then brought in Martin Sheen and Stephen Nemeth.

Still, Palast and I were reluctant. But we kept getting calls to get our story out from Black Voters Matter’s Brown and the NAACP’s Griggs. Palast even got lobbied by Rev. Jesse Jackson calling from a hospital bed.

The film changed in the making. I was drawn deeper into the history of vote suppression, opening long-forgotten FBI files and, deeper, into the well-buried history of the current governor’s family. 280 years ago first brought enslaved Africans to the Georgia colony.

Georgia is America, only more so. I wouldn’t keep returning there if not for the fact that Georgia is the test kitchen for Jim Crow trickery that threatens the election of 2024.

Ultimately, though, I want the audience to meet the extraordinary people at the sharp end of the fight—Christine Jordan, Maj. Turner, Olivia Pearson, George Rhynes and more-- warriors in the ancient fight between the movers and shakers and the moved and shaken.