Democracy is on fire in North Carolina
Democracy is on fire in North Carolina
But there are still reasons for hope
Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report.
It’s hard to think of anything other than the scenes coming out of Israel and Gaza. The war between Hamas and Israel continues to rage, producing shocking images of agonizing civilians mourning their loved ones in kibbutzes while deepening a humanitarian crisis that is teetering on ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.
It is a nightmare, and in so many ways the product of maximal far-right politics. Radical religious extremists, ethnic purists, cynical politicians, the systemic dismantling of democracy, purposeful misinformation, fervent nationalism — it’s all too close to home, even half a world away. Here are my thoughts on the conflict; the only thing that needs updating is the death toll.
Tonight, we’ll look at an erosion of democracy here in the US and what one organization is trying to do about it. Bad news always comes with people who fight back.
Before we get to it, an announcement: I’m now once again taking on clients as a consultant, media strategist, and freelance writer. I’m excited to work with individuals, organizations, and campaigns again, just so long as they don’t conflict with my ongoing work. Happy to talk over any and all ideas — you can email me here!
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It took exactly six minutes from the time that Republicans in the North Carolina legislature overrode the governor’s veto on its omnibus voter suppression bill for the lawsuits to begin hitting the docket.
The legal challenges to SB 747 were filed in tandem, taking aim at different parts of the broad anti-voter law. The progressive nonprofit Down Home North Carolina joined with two other organizations in a lawsuit seeking to block a provision that will likely result in tens of thousands of ballots being thrown out for no legitimate reason.
An Attack on Black, Rural, and Working Class Voters
Up until last week, North Carolinians were permitted to register and cast their ballot simultaneously during the state’s early voting period, with relatively few hurdles to clear. They were also allowed to update their registration, including their residency, on the same day that they voted.
In 2020, there were 116,000 North Carolinians who used the process, or 40,000 more than Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state.
That 116,000 number looks now like a pipe dream. The new law turns same-day registration and voting into a daunting, multi-step process that is likely to result in the disqualification of a significant percentage of ballots.
Whereas before they could register with a single form of identification, including items like a photo ID or a utility bill, they are now required to bring a photo ID and one of several acceptable secondary documents. The new law requires that the address on the photo ID match the secondary document, too. If that isn’t the case, voters have to return to the county board of election with acceptable ID and proof of residency or their vote won’t count.
A study by the NC Board of Elections found that around 36% of the IDs used during same-day registration would not be allowed under the new law.
“Most poor and working class, not just rural voters, in North Carolina rely on same-day registration,” says Dreama Caldwell, the co-executive director of Down Home NC. “Most of the people that we work with, they’re renters, sometimes they’re housing insecure, sleeping with family members, moving around a lot, so their addresses change.”
The newly registered voters are also now required to cast what is known as a “retrievable ballot.” The local board of elections is obligated send a letter to the listed address, and if it comes back undeliverable by the USPS just one time, the ballot is thrown out along with the voter’s application.
For some context: I’ve lived in my current apartment for 18 months and still haven’t had my driver’s license updated. The fact that I only live 20 blocks from my old apartment wouldn’t matter to North Carolina’s board of elections.
This comes in addition to the tight new voter ID law that was permitted by the state Supreme Court in a nauseating and unprecedented decision reversal earlier this year.
An Unpleasant Surprise
One of the most abusive parts of the new law is that voters would have no way of knowing whether their registration and ballot were thrown out as a result of the USPS test. As such, there is no legal recourse for a tossed ballot.
“We're just asking for people to have an opportunity to have their votes counted,” Caldwell adds. “Before this law, no voter would have their ballot thrown out without notice and opportunity to fight for their ballot [to count]. If it's not allowed for people to be able to go back and fix it, it's not really fraud prevention — it's actually voter suppression.”
There are plenty of logical reasons why someone might have mail sent to them bounce back to sender.
In an internal audit released in 2015, the USPS found that it was responsible for 23.5% of undeliverable mail. Of the undeliverable mail that the post service didn’t screw up, 12.5% of failed letters were a result of incomplete secondary addresses, such as a missing apartment number.
Three-quarters of the undeliverable letters were due to the intended recipient moving, but 60% of those that moved did so within the past three months, hardly the stuff of voter fraud. Indeed, voter fraud is almost non-existent in North Carolina (along with everywhere else).
It’s relatively obvious why Republicans wanted to pass this specific provision: The breakdown of who used the same-day process in 2020 was more or less even, but in 2022, Democrats won the same-day vote 41.2 to 25.7%, with unaffiliated voters taking about a third. The early same-day registration option is also used by a disproportionate number of Black voters, who have been the target of relentless suppression bills by the North Carolina legislature over the past decade.
The difference now is that a shady lawmaker’s defection from the Democratic Party gave the GOP a legislative supermajority, and achingly close victories in last year’s state Supreme Court elections gave conservatives a 5-2 majority on the bench. This comes several years after the US Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering was beyond its remit, opening the door for the monstrous maps that are soon to come.
Down Home’s lawsuit, filed with Voto Latino and The Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, faces steep odds, given the courts’ majorities. So too does the other lawsuit over SB 747, which was filed at the behest of the Democratic National Committee.
That lawsuit tackles other aspects of the law, including the major revisions being made to the state election board, new permissions for aggressive partisan “poll watchers” who seek to intimidate voters, and reduced time for absentee ballot arrival.
“My hope is that everyone in the court system is upholding the constitution,” Caldwell says, “regardless of what party or who they are.”
Slow Shifts of a Purple State
North Carolina’s tech sector, lower cost of living, and higher education system were supposed to put it on track to becoming a Democratic state, but it has thus far resisted the big swings that have turned states like Colorado and neighboring Virginia into solid blue states (Virginia, of course, had its own progressive regression in 2021).
Republicans were able to dominate the early part of the 2010s in North Carolina due to an enormous gerrymander in both the state legislature and Congressional delegation, and it was only in 2018 that Democrats were able to get fair maps from what used to be a friendly state Supreme Court.
They failed to take advantage, however, and though Democrats were able to elect Gov. Roy Cooper twice, the party has fallen short in Senate races since 2016 and got locked out of the legislative decision-making.
There is, however, a bright side.
North Carolina’s demographic, population, and partisan shifts have slowly but surely continued to move toward the left. The nonprofit Carolina Forward released on Monday new analysis of 20 years of statewide voter and population shifts that reinforce national trends, with a twist.
The study carried the top line conclusion that majority-white rural counties are moving further toward Republicans, while bigger and faster-growing suburban and urban counties are shifting just as swiftly toward Democrats. Republicans may have won 60 counties to Democrats’ 40, but Democrats are either dominating the largest counties or have seen their margins vastly improve.
Down Home NC does much of its work in rural North Carolina, where it tries to build out organizing infrastructure while pushing back against local government policies that would hurt working people.
Democrats actually won 13 of the 16 rural counties with populations that were at least half BIPOC, but got pummeled in the rural white communities. Time will tell whether the party’s growing strength in the cities and suburbs can make up for its white rural collapse, especially on gerrymandered maps.
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