In a ritual that’s as certain as death and taxes, Republicans here in North Carolina are once again mounting their biennial jihad against Early Voting — and this year with a new weapon.
NC Republicans despise the state’s generous (17 day-long) Early Voting period — a legacy of happier times when Democrats controlled the legislature — because it makes voting easier for wage-earners, students, the disabled and others with limited mobility or unforgiving schedules...none of which are notably Republican base demographics. Here in the Tar Heel State the majority of Democrats typically vote early, while the majority of Republicans typically vote on Election Day.
In the most recently-concluded skirmish in this ongoing war, state Republicans saw their legislative effort to hack the 17-day Early Voting period down to just 10 days overturned by a federal court in 2016. And so, during the past two legislative sessions, they’ve regrouped with all the tenacity of a Whack-A-Mole machine, passing a flurry of new laws engineered to obstruct election administration generally, and Early Voting in particular.
Their most recent successful gambit was the legislative re-jiggering of the composition of both state and county boards of elections, whose members are appointed by the governor (currently Democrat Roy Cooper) from lists of nominees submitted by the state’s Democratic and Republican Party officials. The new law, now coming into effect, upped each county board’s composition from its traditional three appointed members to four members today, evenly divided between Democratic and Republican partisans.
It doesn’t require A Beautiful Mind to instantly perceive that an even number (as opposed to an odd number) of political appointees, evenly split between opposing partisans, will in the natural course of events deadlock in tie votes, thus neutering the boards and rendering their decision-making responsibilities impossible to fulfill. And that’s exactly what happened last night in the first important meeting of such a newly re-engineered body, the Wake County Board of Elections (Wake is the state’s second-largest county, and a traditional Democratic stronghold).
In North Carolina, a county board’s single most important responsibility is to devise its county’s Early Voting plan for the next election: how many polling places will be open for Early Voting, where they will be located around the county, and what hours and days they will be open.
At its meeting last night, the Wake County Board of Elections predictably deadlocked along party lines in this effort. The sticking point was the question of whether or not to drop from this year’s plan the traditional polling site on the North Carolina State University (NCSU) campus in Raleigh — a community of 40,000 students, faculty and staff. The county board’s two Republicans insisted that the site is a waste of tax dollars, and refused to approve it, while the board’s two Democrats refused to deny NCSU its own site.
By law, the matter now gets bumped up to the State Board of Elections, which will impose an Early Voting plan on Wake County, probably in an August meeting. That in itself will be an interesting event, as the State Board’s composition has also been rejiggered. Previously a five-member board (with three members from the serving governor’s party and two from the other major party), it is now a nine-member board with four Republicans, four Democrats, and one unaffiliated member.
In today’s hyper-partisan environment, the only board member whose vote is in question is that of its unaffiliated member. In a stunning development earlier this year, state Democrats managed to resist the appointment of former Chief Justice Burley Mitchell, a conservative ringer, and instead won the appointment of Damon Circosta, executive director of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, a private foundation which awards grants to organizations such as the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, the North Carolina Justice Center, and North Carolina Public Television.
The word in state Democratic circles is that Circosta is a good guy. We shall soon see, as it seems likely that the fate of Early Voting in the Tar Heel State is now in his hands. But hey, but no pressure Damon.
I’ll be live-blogging the August meeting of the State Board of Elections at the Insightus blog. It should be a wild ride indeed, with no doubt all 100 North Carolina counties’ deadlocked Early Voting plans at stake.