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But since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted Section 4 of the act, that power to prevent the use of discriminatory devices has been greatly hobbled. That was evident as my nonagenarian passenger struggled to pull out of her wallet a government-issued photo ID so that the poll workers, who have known her for decades, could allow her to vote.

In addition to voter ID laws, Georgia had implemented a program called “exact match” that a judge had previously ruled was racially discriminatory but was, nonetheless, reborn with all of its defects by the Georgia legislature and in full operation in 2018. This voter registration program was its own literacy test as it required information on the voter registration card to be an exact image of that stored in a state database or Social Security office. An accent or hyphen in one better be there in the other. In this election alone, Mr. Kemp had trapped 53,000 voter registration cards using exact match, and 70 percent of the applicants kicked into electoral purgatory were African-American, including one of my colleagues, a faculty member at Emory University.

Then there was the basic election processes that wreaked havoc at the polls. Voting machines in Snellville in Metro Atlanta arrived with no power cords. People were waiting for hours in a line that was not moving and were finally forced to leave without voting because they had to get to their jobs. This was the same area where absentee ballots were rejected at almost 10 times the state average.

Those Neo-Jim Crow barriers were rising up from Georgia’s Confederate soil like ghosts.

And I kept driving. Another one of my passengers was well into her 80s. She had a special type of wisdom. Sometimes it came like ice and other times like fire. She looked at me while we were coming back from the polls and remarked that she was proud to be able to vote for Ms. Abrams.

Then came the burn. “Stacey Abrams is smart,” she said with a smile. “Just like Obama. Smart. And,” as the smile melted away, “they will hate her just as much.”