North Carolina ranks high on anyone’s short list of today’s too-close-to-call battleground states. But the relative strengths of the two parties’ campaigns may, in the end, prove less important in determining November’s outcome than could the state’s new voter suppression laws — or, alternatively, the growing movement to defeat those laws with one simple piece of paper.
North Carolina’s electorate is balanced on a razor’s edge, as the results of the last two presidential election cycles demonstrate. Thanks to strong African American turnout, the Obama/Biden ticket took the state by 14,000 votes (one-third of a percentage point) in 2008. But that same ticket lost in 2012, by two points, when blacks, college-age voters, and Democrats in general posted modestly lower turnout numbers.
NC Republicans’ new voter suppression laws — widely regarded as the worst in the nation — now aim to insure against defeats like that which the new ruling party last suffered in 2008, by making voting more difficult, or even impossible, for demographic groups which do not traditionally vote their way.
But we can stop that.
2012 was also the year in which Pat McCrory (R) succeeded Bev Perdue (D) as governor of North Carolina, joining forces with a General Assembly already under Republican control to unleash a flood of initiatives aimed at securing Republicans’ ongoing dominance. Not surprisingly, those voter suppression efforts targeted the two groups (blacks and youth) which were most responsible for the party’s 2008 loss. Districts were racially gerrymandered; voter registration at state public assistance offices was brought to a halt; the nation’s most onerous voter ID requirement was imposed; polling places were removed from college campuses and moved farther away from communities of color; the early voting period was cut in half; and pre-registration of 16 and 17 year-olds was put to an end. Finally, election-day voter registration and registration updating — the safety net which previously protected would-be voters against bureaucratic snafus that are discovered only at the last moment — was halted.
Legal challenges to this systematic program of voter suppression, led by voting rights organizations and the U.S. Department of Justice, are today moving slowly through federal courts, having just lost at the District Court level and headed now to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (and from there, undoubtedly, to the Supreme Court). But it’s anyone’s guess whether justice can be achieved in time for the November election.
Amid the ongoing sturm und drang of court battles and street protests, too little discussion has been devoted to how at-risk voters can, individually, today, opt-out of voter suppression — simply by completing a request for an absentee ballot and emailing or snail-mailing it to their county Board of Elections.
“Opting out” of voter suppression sounds to good to be true...but it isn’t. In North Carolina, as in some other states, absentee voting by mail overcomes all of these voter suppression hurdles:
Long lines at polling places that are inconveniently far away:vote on your own schedule, in the comfort of your own home. Just make sure your county Board of Elections receives your completed ballot by return mail no later than 5:00 p.m. on November 1, 2016.
Registration problems: Perhaps you, like many others, have forgotten to update your voter registration after moving to a new address. If you first discover this at your polling place on Election Day, you’re out of luck: you’re disenfranchised for this election. But, in North Carolina, a request for an absentee ballot is also (by law) a voter registration update. If the new address you provide on your absentee ballot request form doesn’t match your currently registered address, the Board of Elections will automatically update your registration.
Ban on out-of-precinct voting: You can’t accidentally show up at the wrong polling place if you’re voting at home, now can you?
Voter ID: This one is critically important. Despite North Carolina’s draconian new voter ID law, no voter ID is required to vote absentee by mail. No photo ID? No problem: you need only provide the last four digits of your Social Security number on your ballot request form.
That last, important point — that voting absentee by mail eliminates the requirement to present a government-issued photo ID — might seem like an astonishing oversight on NC Republicans’ part...but it’s a feature, not a bug; an exclusion intentionally built into the state’s voter suppression laws. The two graphs below illustrate why that is:because absentee voting by mail is, today, the nearly exclusive prerogative of elderly white voters (a reliably Republican demographic). Whites are nearly three times more likely than blacks and Latinos to vote absentee by mail in presidential election years, and the elderly are up to ten times more likely to do so than are young and middle-aged voters.
If you’re not already familiar with the process, voting absentee when you’re not really ‘absent’ may feel a bit dodgy...but it shouldn’t. North Carolina, like twenty-six others, is a ‘no excuse’ state: a voter is not required to offer any reason for voting an absentee ballot. You can vote absentee by mailat home because you find it more convenient, or because you lack an acceptable photo ID, or to avoid the glares of hostile partisan ‘poll monitors,’ or simply to dramatically minimize your many other chances of being disenfranchised. The same is true for certain other states with otherwise draconian voter suppression laws, including Georgia, Wisconsin, and Kansas.
And if you’re involved in voter registration canvassing, shouldn’t you take along with you a stack of absentee ballot request forms, and explain the many advantages of ‘voting at home’ to new registrants? Shouldn’t every voter registration drive do this? Because the job’s not done until you actually get a ballot into that new voter’s hands, and provide him or her with a safe place to cast it.
Opt out of voter suppression, North Carolina. Vote at Home.
POSTSCRIPT: One of the goals behind the publication of this diary was to test the public reception for the ‘Vote At Home’ message before a politically engaged audience of folks who understand the importance of GOTV efforts (i.e, Kossacks). The many positive comments, below, as well as the numerous Facebook shares this article is earning, are encouraging indeed. But a minority of comments express concern that absentee voting by mail is (as one Facebook commenter suggested) “a trap” — more vulnerable to manipulation than are other forms of ballots. Such comments provide a valuable insight for us, indicating that this is a concern which the Vote At Home message must address.
The reality is that there is no form of ballot which cannot be manipulated by hypothetical election officials who are willing to face long prison terms...but some forms of voting are more susceptible to this than others. Electronic voting machines are perhaps the best example; there are no witnesses inside a computer chip. This includes the scantron machines which are commonly used in North Carolina polling places to read ballots filled out by pen. If anything, paper ballots delivered by the U.S. Postal Service, and counted on election day under the watchful eyes of poll monitors, are more secure than are other ballots, because there are witnesses.
One commenter expressed concern that a voter’s zip code, revealed on his mail-in ballot, might be used by rogue officials to mark that ballot for deletion based on the voter’s likely race. In North Carolina, such concerns are unfounded, as our voter registration database already lists every voter’s race, age, sex, zip code, and much more. Here again, absentee voting by mail poses no special vulnerability.
We thank all who have shared their concerns; you are helping us refine the Vote At Home message.
For some, there wasn’t a better venue for America’s first Democracy Convention than the in-your-face capitol of local democracy, Madison, Wisconsin — a state with a long history of progressive sensibilities. Earlier this years thousands of protesters converged upon the capitol in response to Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican legislative majority’s decision to end collective bargaining for public employees — a fight that is not over and one leading to a test of Walker’s reelection capability.
Clad in a tiara, long dress and sash reading "Do You Miss Democracy?" Mary Zepernick approached a table at the Memorial Union Terrace Saturday night with a question clearly on her mind. "Do you miss democracy?" she asked the group. "I do."
It was a bit of street theater, Zepernick, 71, explained the next day in a phone interview. "It's a way to catch the attention of people, to just shake up their minds a little."
From August 24th to August 28, 2011 over 1200 people from around the country convened in Madison for a Democracy Convention designed to further the growing nationwide Democracy Movmeent. This event, sponsored by the Liberty Tree Foundation (which also sponsors the Wisconsin Wave) gave participants and organizers alike the skills to return to their communities and fight for Democracy where it matters most -- in our schools, our workplaces and local economies, our military, our govern
Say what you want about Take Back the Land-Madison, whose members have occupied a handful of foreclosed properties to protest public policies that put families out on the street. Their tactics are audacious, if nothing else. It's a brand of activism with the power to rally the allies and antagonize opponents.
Labor supporters go from the streets and into breakout sessions at the Democracy Convention in Madison. Mayor Paul Soglin kicked off the event reflecting on this year’s massive protests and continued fight against changes by Governor Walker and the Republican majority. He says until then the public was not paying enough attention.
“We cannot rest and assume that others are going to take care of our society,” says Soglin.
The first Democracy Convention got under way Wednesday, and the five-day gathering is expected to draw up to 1,000 political and social activists from across the country.
The convention brought together at least two generations of left-wing activists ready to hash out such issues as voting rights, access to education and U.S. constitutional reform.
Tom Hayden, a key figure in anti-war demonstrations during the Vietnam era, was among the scheduled keynote speakers. The convention was organized by Ben Manski, a 37-year-old Madison attorney and former co-chairman of the national Green Party.
There may be no other convention where you can learn about the history of civil disobedience, go to a class called Organizing 101, and discuss how to make a general strike succeed.
The first ever Democracy Convention will be held in Madison Wednesday through Sunday.
"It's the first national gathering in my lifetime that has focused on the underlying question of who rules," said Ben Manski, former co-chair of the Green Party of the U.S. and an event organizer. "[It] is not just interested in criticizing the lack of democracy in the United States but is devoted toward strengthening the movement to achieve the American promise of democracy."
The timing could not be better, but organizers say plans for this week's Democracy Convention in Madison were set before Gov. Scott Walker's introduction of his collective bargaining bill and the ensuing protests that led some to compare the uprising in Wisconsin to democratic rebellions in Egypt and Tunisia.
The gaffe-prone candidacies of Michele “Elvis” Bachmann and Rick “C’mon, Men, Let’s String Us Up Some Bernanke” Perry, and the slapstick non-candidacy of Sarah “Two If by Sea” Palin, are merely the cheap theater of an ill-defined Republican presidential race. The real drama of the 2012 race continues to come from the CEO party’s CEO candidate: Willard Mitt Romney.
Wisconsin voters have shown time and time again that they are not extremists. Voters in largely Republican areas of the state sent a message in recent days that the actions of those in charge of state government have been too extreme by voting for greater moderation.
In unprecedented state senate recall elections, the number of legislators removed from office in this manner over the 163-year history of Wisconsin was doubled in a single summer. A third of Republican senators targeted for recall were ousted, while two others narrowly survived election-day scares. All three of the targeted Democratic senators were returned to office by comfortable margins.
Five months to the day after the Republican majority in the Wisconsin state Senate voted to approve Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to strip most collective bargaining rights from public employees, two of the governor’s most prominent allies in the chamber have been removed from office.
Western Wisconsin state Sen. Dan Kapanke and eastern Wisconsin Sen. Randy Hopper were both defeated in recall elections that provided a powerful indication of the state’s anger with Walker’s assault on worker rights.
Radio talk show host Thom Hartmann meets Ben Manski, Chair-Democracy Convention / Executive Director of Liberty Tree / Spokesperson for Move to Amend. They show us how to fight back against plutocrats who want to buy elected officials.
With the Democracy Convention beginning in 23 days, we are please to announce our second keynote speaker: Cheri Honkala. She joins Tom Hayden and Michelle Shocked in headlining five days of celebration, strategy, and community-building.
As faith in U.S. political system hits historic lows, organizers announce that
LAUNCH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT WILL BE AUGUST 24-28 IN MADISON, WISCONSIN
(MADISON, WI) ~ The eyes of the nation will return to Madison, Wisconsin, August 24-28, as nearly 1,000 community, labor, and student organizers gather at the first Democracy Convention to launch a movement to bring democracy to the United States.
That's how the state's only Latina state lawmaker sums up the new Assembly and Senate district boundary lines draw up and released by Republican lawmakers a little more than a week ago.
With the state's Latino population jumping from roughly 193,000 in 2000 to 323,000 in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa, D-Milwaukee, says one of the state's 33 Senate seats could have been turned into a predominantly Latino district. The move would have given the state's growing Latino population its first guaranteed voice in the Senate.
Waukesha - When Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said in May that she intended to start providing unofficial election night results broken down by municipality - something that might have flagged the kind of snafu that earned her notoriety after the Supreme Court election this spring - she did not mean all municipal results.
Nickolaus told the County Board's Executive Committee on Monday that she'll change her reporting practices based on advice from the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board.
When pressed in committee by Supervisor David Swan as to whether she'd return to past practice of showing results for municipalities, even if the state elections officials don't suggest it, she said, "Not at this point."
Gov. Scott Walker started his political career as a loser.
A big loser.
In 1990, at the age of 23, Walker waded into state politics as the Republican nominee against first-term state Rep. Gwen Moore in Milwaukee County’s old 7th District.
Walker ran an aggressive campaign that highlighted his strengths and drew support from Republicans who even then saw him as a rising star.
But when the votes were counted on election night — which saw Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson secure a landslide victory — Walker had been pummeled.
Moore (now a progressive Democratic congresswoman) got 69 percent of the vote to Walker’s 31 percent.
Three things are obvious from the ad wars that are quickly escalating in Wisconsin’s recall elections.
One: They will be very, very expensive.
Spending on broadcast TV for just one race — the northwestern Wisconsin seat now held by Republican Sen. Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls — has totaled roughly three-quarters of a million dollars in recent weeks, according to estimates by CMAG, the national firm that tracks campaign spots.
“We are in uncharted territory,” says political scientist and CMAG president Ken Goldstein, referring to the unusual dynamics of these legislative races: mid-summer, stand-alone, quasi-nationalized elections in which nobody is quite sure who will vote and how big the electorate will be.
AUDIO: Soglin full speech (14:30)
