https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/ [login to see] /attorney-laura-coates-just-pursuit
As a Department of Justice attorney charged enforcing voting rights during the Obama administration, Laura Coates says she saw countless ways in which the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was being undermined.
"People went to great lengths to try to engage in voter intimidation, whether it meant trying to move polling places to known Klan locations [or] changing or attempting to change the Election Day practices," she says. "Jurisdictions ... would try to advertise their elections on a different day than Election Day on Spanish language [radio] stations."
Coates saw voter rolls being purged, and instances where jurisdictions pretended that widespread voter fraud was taking place. And, she says, it wasn't just happening in Southern states.
"[It was] also in jurisdictions you wouldn't expect," Coates says. "We would investigate places in Washington state and California and Philadelphia, in the Northeast and all through the country. And so the perception that Jim Crow only flew below the Mason-Dixon line when it came to voting rights was actually a fallacy."