Government

GOP Operatives In North Carolina Advance From ‘Almost Surgical’ To Killing The Minority Vote

While so many GOP members raise a ruckus about nonexistent voter fraud, when election fraud actually happens those same GOP members sit on their hands and turn a blind eye.

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“One thing about your demons they bound to catch up one day /
I’d rather see you stand up and face them than run away.” — J. Cole

Two years ago, the US Court of Appeals (three-judge panel) for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s restrictive voting law. Amongst its many benchslaps, the Fourth Circuit wrote in its opinion:

In response to claims that intentional racial discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.

Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.

This week, This American Life shined a spotlight on North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, where Republican Mark Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes last month. But the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) refused to certify the 9th District’s election results.

One county’s results in the 9th District were quite odd, to say the least. 19% of those voting by mail in Bladen County were registered Republicans, but 61% of the votes by mail went to Mark Harris. As 538 highlights:

In six of the district’s eight counties, fewer than 3 percent of total votes were absentee-by-mail ballots. But in Bladen County, that number was 7.3 percent, suggesting a push to get people there to vote by mail.

Absentee-by-mail ballots tended to be much better for [Democrat Dan McCready] than other ballots — except in Bladen County. There, absentee-by-mail ballots were more Republican-leaning than the rest of Bladen’s votes by 8 percentage points. But if we look at the whole district, absentee-by-mail ballots were 24 points more Democratic-leaning…

Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College who studies North Carolina politics, told the Charlotte Observer that it’s hard to square that statistic with the fact that Harris received 61 percent of Bladen’s absentee-by-mail vote.

As Bitzer noted in his analysis, Harris would have had to win every registered Republican, along with nearly every unaffiliated voter and some registered Democrats, to reach that total, which seems implausible. In other counties, McCready’s margin in absentee-by-mail ballots tracked closely with the percentage of absentee-by-mail ballots cast by registered Democrats.

While so many GOP members raise a ruckus about nonexistent voter fraud, when election fraud actually happens those same GOP members sit on their hands and turn a blind eye. I’m surprised some of them didn’t tweet out their “thoughts and prayers” for this self-inflicted wound. My colleague Elie Mystal wrote about this very issue earlier this month in a piece titled, “Good Time To Point Out Voter ID Would Not Stop Republican Election Fraud.”

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The revealing statistics don’t even fully tell this crazy story. You need to read about vice chair of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District, and GOP operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless (see here, here, and here), who partially confessed to ballot harvesting in Bladen County in the 2016 election, only to become more brazen in the same county for Mark Harris in last month’s election.

As noted in the Charlotte Observor: “Harris confirmed that it was his decision to hire Dowless for his campaign. Harris said the decision came after his primary loss to Republican Congressman Robert Pittenger in the 2016 campaign, when the candidate who finished third in that contest handily won the absentee ballots in Bladen County.”

While the 9th District race remains unresolved it is clear that there was election fraud in Bladen County — thanks to political scientist Michael Blitzer as well as several witnesses of the fraud. It is bad enough the 9th District is so gerrymandered it looks like a hockey stick. Now combine some of the worse gerrymandering in the country (see here, here, and here) with the state’s new voting right law to suppress nonexistent in-person voting fraud and shady operatives like McCrae Dowless — and the GOP has perfected a hat-trick of minority voter suppression tactics.

Let’s just hope on January 11, when the NCSBE holds its evidentiary hearing on voting irregularities in Bladen County, the political scientists’ testimonies carry some weight. We cannot continue to ignore scientists.

In the words of the Fourth Circuit: “It is beyond dispute that ‘voting is of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure.’ For ‘[n]o right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.’”

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Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

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