In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described state governments as “laboratories of democracy,”in which
a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
But today’s flying monkeys — like ALEC and the Koch brothers’ well-oiled machine — exist specifically to ensure that the rest of the Union can no longer remain insulated from any one Red state’s maddest science experiments gone horribly awry.
Which is why the fate that North Carolina Republicans have planned for our state’s election system in 2018 should concern not only Tar Heels, but every friend of democracy. Because as things stand right now, the state GOP is on a course to obliterate one of the truly great electoral innovations of our time: Early Voting. And if they succeed here, that same mad science will be coming to your state soon.
This is the story of an imminent threat to democracy that you haven’t heard elsewhere, because putting its pieces together requires a bit more digging than the typical pundit is willing to muster. But join with me as I try to make it easy to understand, with a little help from the progressive data scientists at Insightus.