When Republicans in North Carolina started putting together their voter suppression laws, they claimed to be combatting non-existent voter fraud. According to the GOP, voters no longer trusted our electoral system. They might have a point, but voters lost trust in the system because of a process increasingly rigged to protect a political class, not because of massive voter fraud.
Districts are gerrymandered to ensure incumbents get re-elected. The skyrocketing costs of campaigns favors candidates who can at least partially self-fund. And then there’s the case of Phil Berger, Jr.
Berger, Jr. is running for office again. Last time he ran, he lost in a GOP Congressional primary to Mark Walker. In that race, Berger had all of the advantages. The political establishment, including his father, Senate President Pro-tem Phil Berger, Sr., was behind him. He had all the money and he was the District Attorney for Rockingham County. Still, Walker won a run-off election and even defeated Berger in his home county.
Not to be deterred from keeping a government paycheck, Phil Berger, Jr., decided to run for the court of appeals against incumbent Judge Linda Stevens. This time, though, it appears somebody at the legislature (where Phil Berger, Sr. is the most powerful member) decided to put a little more pressure on the scales. In the final days of the legislative cycle, a bill was passed that put Phil Berger’s name first on the ballot. It may not make much of a difference in the actual outcome of the election, but it makes a lie out of all the GOP claims about restoring confidence in the system.
If the GOP really wanted to restore confidence in the electoral system, they would pass a bill authorizing an independent redistricting commission. They would stop redistricting local political jurisdictions. They would make fewer races partisan and they would keep their fingers out of petty maneuvers like ballot order.
Republicans in North Carolina have no interest in restoring confidence in the electoral process. Their whole rational for voter suppression measures was a farce. Using legislative maneuvers to help Republican candidates like Phil Berger, Jr., show political privilege, not political reform.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
The Voter ID Law was not the Only way that Republicans dug into their bag of Dirty Tricks to tip the scale of democracy. They also did this ;
“Study: North Carolina’s changes to early voting sites have dramatic racial disparity”
” Black voters in North Carolina will have to travel roughly 350,000 extra miles in order vote early after the state moved 114 of the state’s 363 early voting sites (while adding three locations) last year, according to a new analysis from insightus, a non-profit data consultancy. White voters in the state will have to travel a total of just 21,000 extra miles, despite representing 71% of the state’s population (African-Americans account for 22% of the population).”
“On average, each white voter is now just 26 feet farther from an early voting site; the average black voter is more than a quarter mile farther away. In other words, shifting the polling locations moved black voters’ nearest early voting location more than 50 times farther away than it did for their white counterparts.”
source: http://americablog.com/2015/11/study-north-carolinas-changes-early-voting-sites-racial-disparity.html
Then there was the misleading “Voter Information fliers ” that was mass mailed to minority voter addresses just before the 2014 mid-term by American for Prosperity.
Let us not forget the first time ever breakdown of the Board of Election real time election return web site in the 2014 elections. Many IT security experts have indicated that this could have been a sign of digital tampering with the voting returns underway.
Tricky Pat contracted a voting machine company that had already been convicted of routing voting machine data through the RNC servers in the last national election. That being said, I suspect that if the truth be known, most if not all of the NC GOP holds their office by virtue of “Election Fraud” which has always been the real issue with the republican party when they are in elections , remember Al Gore and the Florida election for instance.
Kinda’ funny how the people who purport themselves to be Christians are the most ruthless and shameless. It is sad that their constituents possess the IQ of a bag of door knobs and are thus unaware of the fact that the politicians have their hands in their pockets and their you know what up their “this is going to hurt you more than it is going to hurt me.” All the while thumpin’ those Bibles and totin’ those guns. Thank goodness they are going to make America great again. NOT!!
Voter fraud may not be massive, but it is real.
Four years ago my mother, a lifelong Democrat who was in her late 70s but very active) went to vote. They wouldn’t let her because someone had already voted using her name. Finally she was allowed to cast a provisional ballet. Whether it counted or not she never knew.
That won’t happen now.
Is it possible that your mother has a name that is easily confused? Or is there another person with an almost identical name? I ask because there is a woman in Charlotte with the same name as mine except for middle initial. Odds on that happening? I have no idea, but there have already been two instances in which confusion occurred in past two years. Not at the voting booth, and neither situation caused any serious problems. Yours is the first instance I have heard of in the past 15 years or so of this ongoing insistence that voter fraud is real and must be legislated. I know of no study confirming the claims of voter fraud and no records of actual charges against people committing such fraud. Do you have any? Would like to see them.
And the GOP took over the General Assembly in 2010. Six years ago. You need to blame the GOP not the Democratic Party. They prevented you mother from voting.
Where is the evidence of massive voter fraud? If you believe it’s obvious or evident, prove it.
The legislation does not pass the smell test, and I hope his opponents use every opportunity to point out the special privilege accorded him. Another reason to not have Senator Berger in office either. Will we get an independent redistricting commission? Only if enough people (regardless of party affiliation) insist — loudly and constantly.