Last July, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned North Carolina’s “monster voter suppression law,” HB589, finding that it unconstitutionally "targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision." But if you thought that would put an end to state-sponsored voter suppression in the Tar Heel State — even if only for just this year — you clearly don’t understand the single-minded devotion with which NC’s GOP officials relentlessly attack African American voting rights in a battleground state whose electorate is 22% black.
One result of the court’s July verdict was to send the state’s 100 county boards of elections back to the drawing board, to re-engineer their Early Voting plans for the upcoming election. With the lifting of HB589’s restriction of Early Voting to just 10 days, they were once again free offer up to 17 days, as the statutes in place in 2012 had provided then, and do once again.
But the state GOP had other plans. As we relate in our report:
In August, NC-GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse was embarrassed by the revelation of a private email in which he called upon the Republicans controlling the state's county boards of elections to "make party-line changes to early voting" for 2016. Calling for the abolition of Sunday voting, Woodhouse wrote "many of our folks are angry and are opposed to Sunday voting." Encouraging the strategic placement of polling places away from neighborhoods that are home to demographics less sympathetic to Republican candidates, he asserted that "no group of people are entitled to their own early voting site."
And in a broad call to hamstring early voting in every other way possible, Woodhouse observed that "same–day registration is only available during early voting," made the unsupportable claim that "same–day registration is ripe [sic] with voter fraud," and completed the non sequiter by concluding that "we [Republicans] are under no obligation to offer more opportunities for voter fraud."
Insightus has just published a new investigative report looking deeply into the details of those 100 new county voting plans adopted post-HB589 (and, more to the point, post-Woodhouse).
First the good news. We found that a majority of the state’s Republican-controlled county boards heeded their better angels, adopting Early Voting plans that were sufficiently generous to voters to raise the state’s overallaggregate Early Voting statistics substantially over 2012’s.
But by crunching the more than 50,000 data points that make up our database of 2012’s and 2016’s Early Voting plans, and folding in Census Bureau demographic data, we uncovered a minority of counties — about 17 (depending on how you score things) — whose 2016 plans deliver the lion’s share of their benefits predominantly to North Carolina’s white voters while reserving the worst of their negative impacts for African Americans.
For example: while the number of counties offering Sunday ‘souls to the polls’ voting hours in 2016 increased (to 22 from 21 in 2012), that improvement came as the net result of 4 counties offering Sunday voting for the first time this year while 3 others abolished Sunday voting entirely. The four new (and mostly small rural) counties are home to just 2% of the state’s black voters, while the three counties that lost Sunday voting account for 6% of the state’s blacks.
That’s a net of 4% of NC’s black voters who will be denied the right to vote on a Sunday that they enjoyed in 2012, or 59,000 voters. Hardly a trivial number in a bright purple battleground state where, for instance, in 2014 Thom Tillis (R) beat incumbent U.S. Senator Kay Hagan (D) by just 49,000 votes.
And there’s more where that came from, ranging from predominantly white counties that saw increases in total Early Voting days this year while neighboring blacker counties saw cuts, to a strikingly similar racial imbalance between counties that either expanded or cut their ‘off-hours’ (voting hours outside of the conventional work week of 8 AM to 5 PM weekdays).
Of greatest concern is the presence of some of NC’s largest counties among the ‘rogues.’ North Carolina is a mix of a few big urban counties and a large number of small rural ones, so voter suppression efforts in just those few large counties have outsized effects on the entire state’s electorate.
Mecklenburg, for example, is home to the booming city of Charlotte and is the state’s largest county (pop. 1 million), claiming 15% of all of the state’s black voters but just 8% of non-Hispanic whites. And Mecklenburg tops our list of ‘rogue’ counties for 2016. Its majority-white board of elections comprehensively cut many of the Early Voting features we looked at in our analysis (including open days, total hours, and off-hours). Mecklenburg’s mind-boggling cuts to Early Voting now leave it so far behind the Early Voting curve that there’s an excellent chance its over-burdened election day voting could be a real Florida-style mess, with impossibly long lines, delayed returns, and administrative snafus that may leave North Carolina’s November 8th results either in doubt or — even worse — contested.
Voting rights champions in the Tar Heel State are fighting back, but time is running out (early voting begins on October 20th). Last weekend a request for an emergency injunction against the voting plans of five NC counties, including Mecklenburg, was filed in federal District Court, seeking a decision from the court by October 7th.
There’s more to learn about North Carolina’s extremely dicey Early Voting situation this year in our new report at Insightus.