North Carolina GOP boasts that its voter suppression efforts are working

Press release celebrates that African-American early voting is down in the state.

477
SOURCEThink Progress

After Republican leaders mounted a concerted and illegal effort to make it harder for African Americans to vote in North Carolina, the party apparatus celebrated on Monday that fewer African Americans have voted in North Carolina this year.

In July, a federal appeals court struck down an “omnibus” election law, passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory (R), writing that it was “hard not to come away with the conclusion that North Carolina’s lawmakers wanted to get caught engaging in unlawfully racial discrimination.” The court found that the GOP legislature had “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” and then “enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.” In an unsuccessful appeal, the state actually claimed that its efforts would instead increase minority turnout.

After that failed, North Carolina Republicans used their two-to-one edge on electoral boards to slash early voting options and force long lines at the few early voting locations in urban centers like Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, and Winston-Salem. Unsurprisingly, almost 9 percent fewer African Americans took advantage of early voting than had in 2012.

According to Colin Campbell of the Raleigh-based News & Observer, the North Carolina GOP sent out a press release titled “North Carolina Obama Coalition Crumbling,” citing the decline in African-American early voting and the increase in “Caucasian” early voting.

Should Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper defeat incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory (R) on Tuesday, the GOP will lose its control for the next four years over the local elections boards that put up these road blocks for minority voters.

Pledge to Vote

FALL FUNDRAISER

If you liked this article, please donate $5 to keep NationofChange online through November.

SHARE
Previous articleHow a company with ties to a Dakota Access Pipeline owner flew over protests in the no fly zone
Next article6 ways governments around the world are taking climate action
Josh Israel is a senior investigative reporter for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Previously, he was a reporter and oversaw money-in-politics reporting at the Center for Public Integrity, was chief researcher for Nick Kotz’s acclaimed 2005 book Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America, and was president of the Virginia Partisans Gay & Lesbian Democratic Club. A New England-native, Josh received a B.A. in politics from Brandeis University and graduated from the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia, in 2004. He has appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News, Current TV, and many radio shows across the country.

COMMENTS