The NAACP set up a legal war room this weekend to take calls from voters who are turned away, intimidated or blocked at the polls, with lawyers ready to go to court on Election Day. It is the group’s answer to a midterm map redrawn in several states and a Voting Rights Act that has less force than it did a year ago.
The hub, scheduled to open Oct. 24 and led by NAACP General Counsel Kristen Clarke, who ran the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, will take calls, emails and online reports, investigate complaints and coordinate legal volunteers nationwide. “We have an army of legal volunteers across the country and are prepared to activate and seek emergency relief on Election Day where necessary,” Clarke has said.
The NAACP says 52,000 volunteers have signed up, well past its first goal of 20,000. It is targeting 6.5 million voters in 33 congressional districts across 16 priority states, among them Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. It also plans to mobilize 100,000 Black men through National Black Man Voter Day. Blavity, which reported the campaign’s launch earlier, put its cost at $20 million, the largest midterm program in the organization’s 117 years.
Florida shows why. The Legislature redrew its congressional map in the middle of the decade, as part of a push President Donald Trump urged on states last summer, and left one Black-majority district, the 24th. Black residents are 12% of the state’s registered voters.
The legal ground has shifted too. In April, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais sharply narrowed how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge maps that dilute Black votes. The provision had been the main tool for forcing states to draw districts where Black voters can elect their candidates.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson framed the effort as a refusal to be scared off. “We cannot buy into the fear,” he said. “Donald Trump wants us to be afraid, because he is a deeply unpopular president.”
The group is also working with the National Urban League and 100 Black Men of America on turnout. Election Day is Nov. 3.
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