SOPCHOPPY, Fla. — A small Florida Panhandle town best known for its annual Worm Grunting Festival is at the center of an investigation into charges that the white city clerk suppressed the black vote in an election where the black mayor lost by a single vote and a black city commissioner also was ousted.
Both losing candidates and three black voters have filed complaints — being investigated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — that City Clerk Jackie Lawhon made it more difficult for blacks to cast ballots by questioning their residency.
The candidates also claim Lawhon abandoned her duty to remain neutral and campaigned for the three whites on the ballot.
“If the allegations that we have are 100 percent accurate, then this election was literally stolen from us, and I really feel like there should be another election,” said Anginita Rosier, who lost her seat on the commission by 26 votes.
Lawhon, who has served in her position since being appointed more than three decades ago, referred calls to city attorney Dan Cox. He would not comment on the specifics of the complaints but said, “I don’t think that anything was done that was out of line.”
The allegations were made about two weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
That provision required several states and other jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to get federal approval before changing election procedures. Opponents said that requirement was outdated because of the nation’s racial progress since the 1960s.
Preventing anyone from voting because of race remains illegal under state and federal law. But if the claims in this Southern town of fewer than 500 people are substantiated, activists are likely to seize on the case as an example of how racial discrimination at the polls has not been eradicated — and why protections like those overturned by the Supreme Court should remain in place.
“The League of Women Voters is on a really high alert regarding the situation,” said state chapter president Deirdre Macnab. “These kinds of situations should make it clear to all Americans how important it is for Congress to act definitively and quickly.”
Sopchoppy sits on the edge of a national forest about 35 miles southwest of Tallahassee. Whites outnumber blacks about 3-to-1. Other than cars zipping along U.S. 319 that leads to the Gulf Coast beaches, little traffic passes by the kudzu-draped utility lines.
Former Mayor Colleen Skipper-Mitchell and Rosier say Lawhon should have been neutral because she was running the election. Instead, Rosier says, Lawhon called white voters to encourage them to vote absentee for the white candidates and offered to deliver ballots to them.
Whites “were basically told how to vote and who to vote for,” Rosier said.
