On October 24th, Takeyla Singleton, a housekeeper at a Best Western hotel in Cordele, Georgia, posted a two-minute video to her Facebook account. Earlier that day, Singleton, who is African-American, like the majority of the town’s residents, had filmed Royce Reeves, Sr.—a forty-six-year-old barber and an elected city commissioner—receiving a ticket for illegally parking a limousine on Highway 19. Reeves, who is also black, had recently borrowed the vehicle to take poor or unmotivated residents to the polls to vote early. (I wrote about one such ride for this week’s issue of The New Yorker.) He twice voted for Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, and is now an outspoken supporter of Stacey Abrams, the African-American Democrat running for governor of Georgia; by November 6th, Reeves expected to assist as many as four hundred Abrams voters. Along the way, he often shouted out the window of the limo at passersby, which was out of the ordinary in a quiet town otherwise best known for its watermelons.

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Moments after one state patroller engaged Reeves on the side of the highway, more law-enforcement vehicles began to show up. “It’s stupid. Look at them,” Singleton tells another observer in the video. “They called all that backup.” She went on, counting law-enforcement vehicles surrounding the white limo, which was on loan from the J. W. Williams funeral home. “One, two, three, four.” Someone else said, “Six cars!” Singleton went on, “Seven. . . . That’s a crying shame. On one little person. And the man driving the funeral-home car.”

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

Reeves told me he’d driven past the first patroller, who was ticketing someone else, then made a left and went a few blocks farther—beyond the view of the patroller—to talk to a man about his commissioner work. “They turned the lights on me,” he told me. ”And the guy, one of the troopers, when he got out of the car he spoke to me ugly. I said, ‘I’m not a criminal. If you’re gonna give me a ticket for being improperly parked, give me a ticket.’ They called in a bunch more troopers.” Reeves added, “They knew that that limousine was being used to haul people to the polls. They knew that. How many other people riding around town in a limousine?”

Serious claims of voter suppression have been made against Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor. As secretary of state, Kemp is in charge of elections and voter registration, which puts him in a position to referee his own contest. (For this reason, the former President Jimmy Carter, among others, has called on Kemp to resign from the position.) Kemp cancelled nearly one and a half million Georgia voter registrations, for various reasons, between the 2012 and 2016 elections, and more than half a million more in 2017. In August, an elections consultant linked to Kemp recommended the closure of seven of nine polling locations—many of them used by African-American voters—in a poor southwestern Georgia county. (The plan was voted down.) In another poor Georgia county, during Kemp’s tenure as secretary of state, an African-American grandmother, attempting to help a new voter use an electronic voting machine, was charged with the unusual crime of “improper assistance in casting a ballot.” Six years later, after two trials, the elderly poll worker was finally acquitted.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled against Kemp’s attempt to prohibit certain absentee ballots from being counted, writing, “The Court finds that the public interest is best served by allowing qualified absentee voters to vote and have their votes counted.” Perhaps the most significant suppression claim against Kemp, though, has focussed on a reported fifty-three thousand voters—some seventy per cent of them African-American—whose registration is “on hold” due to an “exact match” voter-I.D. law, which creates problems for voters who’ve changed their address or their name. A few weeks ago, Debra Roberts, a clerk at a warehousing company who moved to Georgia nearly two decades ago, told me, “When I moved here I changed my last name and they said everything went through. But every time I go to vote, they say, ‘No, your name isn’t right.’ This time it’s supposed to be changed, but I just don’t know if my vote is being counted.” (People like Roberts can still vote, with sufficient identification.)

But there is also concern that voters, particularly minorities, are being intimidated in other ways, at the local level—a few weeks ago, for instance, a bus full of black seniors was pulled over on the way to the polls in a rural Georgia county. The same is true of the Reeves incident, Seth Bringman, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia, argues. “Brian Kemp has hardly tried to hide his desire to see fewer people of color voting in Georgia,” Bringman told me, “and the culture of fear, intimidation, and confusion he has created statewide is pervasive at a local level as well,” as when “a black councilman is stopped while simply trying to provide members of his community with rides to the polls.”

I asked the Cordele Police Department about the incident. “Traffic stops are inheritably dangerous,” Andrew Roufs, an administrative lieutenant, wrote in an e-mail on Wednesday, “as the officer(s) conducting these stops have no prior knowledge of what may happen or what the stop may lead to. Typically, when multiple officers respond to any call for service, the officer(s) only intention is to ensure everyone’s safety and, in this case, this would include the driver, officer, and any bystanders.” He went on, “It is the policy of the Cordele Police Department to provide assistance, when requested, to an agency or officer as in this case.” Roufs, who wouldn’t say why the Cordele officers were called in the first place, referred me to the Georgia State Patrol.

On Wednesday, I received a response from Mark Perry, a public-information officer with the State Patrol. “One trooper conducted the traffic stop for illegally parking,” Perry wrote in an e-mail. “The driver was out of the vehicle with a small crowd,” he went on. “The trooper asked for a backup unit due to the number of people. One local trooper responded. Three other troopers assigned to I-75”—a nearby interstate—“from another region overheard the radio traffic and responded on their own. I have no knowledge as to why local police went to the scene. The driver was cited and released.” I asked Perry whether it was typical for five or more troopers to respond to a parking incident involving an unarmed individual. Perry explained, “It’s not unusual when a trooper is outnumbered by bystanders approaching a traffic stop.” (Asked to comment about the incident, Kemp’s press secretary did not immediately respond.)

As it happens, I was in the funeral limo earlier that day with Reeves. Hours before the illegal parking incident, Reeves took a phone call. “I’ve had the cops called on me twice today,” Reeves told the caller.“They say I’m campaigning too close to the polls, soliciting votes. I told the Sheriff, ‘We did no more in this campaign than we did for you.’ ” When he spotted a young black friend being pulled over in town by a white trooper (the young man hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt), Reeves angled the limo into a parking lot directly across the street. We got out and watched the stop unfold over a period of ten minutes. At one point, Reeves took out his smartphone and held it up as if he were filming the incident. (I did the same.) No additional troopers showed up to back up the ticketing officer in this instance, despite a small crowd of young black men close by. Reeves later told me that this same patroller was among those who showed up when he was pulled over later that day.