Mississippi’s white leaders did not disguise their intentions. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” James K. Vardaman, one of the constitution’s framers as well as a future governor and senator, once boasted. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.”

The government had commissioned a report on fraud after a scandal in Tower Hamlets, a borough in East London, where the elected mayor was stripped of his office last year and found guilty of corrupt practices involving voting fraud