Jemele Hill doesn’t back down from speaking out against the social injustices she sees happening in sports or elsewhere. But while the sports journalist normally uses her platform to bring awareness to others’ issues, a new op-ed for The Atlantic is shining a light on an injustice the former SC6 host faced, herself.
While trying to place her vote for Florida gubernatorial hopeful, Andrew Gillum, Hill was told that she was no longer on the list of registered voters for her polling location.“When I showed up at the polling site near my house, I had been kicked off the registered-voter roll,” Hill explained in the article. “A flurry of phone calls, and lots of head-nodding and “mmm-hmm”s from the supervisor of the polling site, failed to produce any explanation of why the system wasn’t showing me as a registered voter.”What Hill and election officials later concluded is a tweet mentioning her support for the Tallahassee mayor is what got her booted from the record books. “Shortly after I left the polling site, an official from the elections office called me and told me that a tweet I had posted a few weeks earlier had been brought to their attention,” Hill detailed. “I had written that I had recently moved to Los Angeles, but was returning to Florida for early voting so I could vote for Andrew Gillum, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate.”
Gonna be completely transparent here: So I just moved to LA this week, but yet I’m flying to Florida tonight because that’s where I’ve voted since 2005. I came for early voting because of this pic.twitter.com/XQDFvX38Qc
The tweet apparently drove Trump supporters to report Hill for voter fraud, causing her to be wiped from the system. Although the official later conceded that her actions weren’t illegal, whether or not Hill’s vote for Gillum will actually count, is still to be determined.
