In a blatant attempt to intimidate minority voters in rural Georgia, Olivia Coley Pearson, the first black woman to be elected city commissioner of Douglas, Georgia, was charged with—and eventually acquitted of—multiple felonies for simply assisting a first-time voter in 2012.
Pearson’s life has been dedicated to the service of others. Political activism runs in the family: In the 1970s, Pearson’s mother served with the local NAACP and helped sue their home city of Douglas, Georgia, to gain more black political representation.
Pearson’s mother lived long enough to see her daughter elected the first black woman on Douglas’s city commission, a position she’s held for the past two decades. A tenacious and outspoken advocate for the black community, Pearson pressed for equal employment opportunities in city government and took complaints of police abuse seriously.
Her tenure, unsurprisingly, had raised the ire of people in the city’s mostly white power structure by 2012, when she helped a first-time black voter understand how to work an electronic voting machine on the first day of early voting in Barack Obama’s re-election.
When the 21-year-old woman arrived at her local polling place ready to cast her first vote, she realized she wasn’t sure how to use the machine. She looked around for help and saw Pearson. Pearson told the young woman how to operate the machine and where to put her card. At poll workers’ request, Pearson signed a form stating she’d offered this simple guidance. It was a brief interaction, to which neither woman gave any further thought—until, in 2016, with another presidential election looming, Coffee County prosecutors charged Pearson with multiple counts of felony voter fraud. If convicted, she faced up to 15 years in prison.
No one accused Pearson of influencing another person’s vote or of physically touching their machine. Prosecutors claimed that because the young woman helped was not blind or illiterate, she was not legally entitled to any assistance whatsoever.
“Improper voting assistance” is not something for which people of means are typically prosecuted. But Pearson was a black woman working to hold her city accountable and empower others in her community to serve in government themselves. Her prosecution sent a not-so-subtle message of intimidation in a state where voter suppression takes many insidious forms.