"We will make sure not one single vote in this state is either cast or counted without Republican observers and attorneys in the room," said state Republican Party chair Michael Whatley at last week's Wake County Republican Party convention. The pledge to ramp up political scrutiny of polling sites ahead of the mid-term elections comes at a time that election officials nationwide are raising an alarm about the polarized voting environment.
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elections
elections
As a chemist and immigrant from Vietnam, Linh Nguyen never thought she could have a role in U.S. politics. But then Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 and he “unknowingly inspired minority leaders, women of color like me, to be more actively engaged in politics,” she said. She joined the nonpartisan League of Women Voters in DeKalb County, Illinois, where she lives with her husband and two young children, and was elected the group’s president in March 2020.
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Filing season for the 2022 elections opened in true North Carolina style Monday, with the state Court of Appeals suspending filing for newly-drawn congressional and legislative districts under court challenge. That didn’t prevent filing from opening at noon as scheduled for North Carolina’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, just as a shakeup in both the Republican and Democratic primaries has narrowed the field and the focus of the contests.
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Four out of five Americans, across the political spectrum, consistently support transparency when it comes to contributions to organizations that spend money on campaigns. Unfortunately, a growing number of states, now including North Carolina, are advancing so-called "donor privacy" bills to block public access to information about who is spending big money to secretly influence our vote and our government.
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It comes as little surprise that politicians have long generally favored voting rules that they have perceived as being beneficial to themselves and their allies. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, racist white Democrats in the South concocted convoluted rules to suppress the votes of African Americans who generally favored Republicans – the party of Abraham Lincoln.
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A young Black man approached the tabulator and inserted his ballot. He stood back, unsure of what would happen next. The machine inhaled it. Moments later, a message on the screen signaled that his ballot had been accepted. In the most historic election in modern history, his vote would count. “First time voter!” a poll worker announced. The polling place erupted in applause.
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Republicans add language in effort to circumvent two court injunctions; final vote today What started as a bipartisan effort to address the challenge of administering an election during the COVID-19 pandemic has devolved into a battle over another Republican attempt to require North Carolinians to show a photo ID to cast a ballot in November.
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One can imagine a scenario in which it might be possible to take North Carolina Republican leaders seriously when they argue that a strict voter ID law is necessary to protect the “integrity” of North Carolina elections. If, for instance, those same leaders had long evinced support for rigorous integrity and transparency in all other key electoral circumstances – say, with respect to the way voting districts are drawn ...
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