A group of Atlanta pastors is warning about fake election signs in city neighborhoods that could confuse Black voters on Election Day.
A sign spotted in northwest Atlanta said the election is Thursday, Nov. 5, instead of Tuesday, Nov. 3, according to WSB-TV.
The issue came up at a meeting of Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta on Monday, where the organization clearly said, “That’s not true. This is not true.”
At the meeting, the pastors made it clear that the election was not on Thursday, but the very next day.
The group’s president, the Rev. Shanan Jones, told the meeting that these signs are not everywhere.
“I’ve only seen this in the Black community,” he told the crowd. “It’s trickery,” he said while holding up a fake sign.
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The pastors believe the fake signs are an effort to trick and confuse Black voters.
Jones says it’s a concerted effort.
“The same folks that have been trying to disenfranchise and marginalize people. The same folks that want to take your right to vote,” Jones said, adding that he’s only seen these fake election signs in the Black community.
It was another pastor, associate Pastor Gregory Saunders of Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church, who first saw a fake sign and thought the election date had changed, WSB reported.
When Saunders realized the date had not changed, he removed the sign and notified his congregation about the possible attempt to confuse voters.
Saunders said that a short time later, another pastor, also in a predominantly Black neighborhood, saw a sign with the wrong date.
Saunders talked with WSB reporter Tom Jones about the signs.
“Who would do this?” Jones wondered.
The pastor didn’t have to think about it.
“Someone who is intentional. Who doesn’t want to see the process work honestly,” he said.
There’s a lot riding on the midterms in Georgia. If Trump’s dismal approval rating and unpopular policies are any indication, Democrats might have an actual shot at the governor’s mansion.
If former Atlanta mayor and Democratic candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms wins, she’d be the first-ever Black woman elected governor in the U.S.
It would also put Georgia at the center of a historic election that gives Democrats significantly more power and ends a 22-year trifecta of Republican control over state government.
Bottoms, 56, is in a dead heat with billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson, 72, a political novice who has poured more than $200 million of his own money into the campaign, including a relentless onslaught of TV and social media ads painting Bottoms as an ineffectual mayor who presided over a crime wave in Atlanta during the pandemic.
Bottoms has defended her mayoral record, including investments in public safety and affordable housing, while guiding the city through an unprecedented public health crisis and attendant social unrest. She promises to expand Medicaid, protect voting rights, lower taxes on groceries, and pause the development of data centers, which many Georgians do not favor.
