In fairness, black folks in the South have legitimate reasons to be a bit leery of a public "here's who voted" list. Plenty alive today were alive during Jim Crow.
Threatening a person(the possible governor) is different than threatening the entire black population. If white supremacists wanted to just kill random black people, they don't need a voter roll for that. If they wanted to kill just black people who voted for Abrams, the voter roll doesn't tell them that. If they wanted to kill anyone who would vote for Abrams, then expressing your support for her on facebook seems far more dangerous than actually casting a secret ballot.
The Klan still exists, and I don't blame someone who lived through Jim Crow for retaining the fear, just as Depression-era folks often tend to scrimp and save despite nearly a century of relative economic stability.
Sure, fine, but most black people alive today did not live through the Jim Crow era. If the klan wants to terrorize black people, they don't need the voter rolls to do it. Go attack any random black family and the odds are good that you just attacked a family with at least one voter in it.
> Sure, fine, but most black people alive today did not live through the Jim Crow era.
Jim Crow only formally ended a little over 50 years ago, and let's not pretend the folks enforcing it took that SCOTUS ruling and went "ooops, my bad, we'll be good now!" Racial disparities in things like policing, voter suppression, etc. all still exist. Many Southern jurisdictions were still under DOJ supervision until 2013, and probably still should be.
As with Depression-era folks, some of the fears and practices get passed down. There are folks with Scottish ancestors from the 1600s who do their weddings in kilts hundreds of years later; the idea that fear of Jim Crow can't be passed down is absurd.
> If the klan wants to terrorize black people, they don't need the voter rolls to do it.
It should be fairly obvious that it makes it significantly easier to suppress voting if you have a list of voters to specifically target.
> Just prior to the 1990 general election, postcards were sent to over 100,000 black voters in the state. The sending of these postcards was financed directly by the North Carolina Republican Party and indirectly by Senator Helms’ reelection campaign. As I recall several thousand white voters were sent postcards as well. Information gathered by DOJ during its investigation showed that the voting precincts targeted to receive the postcard mailing were 94% black, overall.
> The postcard contained inaccurate information telling voters that they could not vote on Election Day if they did not reside at the address at which they were registered for the 30 days prior to the election. The postcard also suggested that any voter who did attempt to vote would be subject to federal prosecution.
This case wound up with a consent decree being put into place.
As for number of instances, I'm not sure how you'd possibly begin to quantify that. Most instances would result in no reporting whatsoever, those reported would be hard to prosecute (anonymous threatening calls, for example), etc. What's clear is intimidation/suppression attempts do still occur - it's trivial to find examples of them.
