Voting rights groups accuse N.C. of breaking federal voter registration law

[G_j]

http://www.indyweek.com/news/archives/2015/05/08/voting-rights-groups-accuse-nc-of-breaking-federal-voter-registration-law

Between 2007 and 2012, public agencies in North Carolina helped to register an average of 38,400 residents annually. Since Gov. Pat McCrory took office in 2013, that number has plunged to about 16,000.
That's one of several troubling allegations made Friday by voting rights groups accusing the state of failing to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Perhaps better known as the "motor voter" law, it requires that public assistance agencies, disability services agencies and motor vehicle offices offer to assist with voter registration.

In a letter to N.C. State Board of Elections Executive Director Kim Westbrook Strach and Aldona Wos, secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, lawyers representing Democracy North Carolina, Action N.C. and the A. Philip Randolph Institute gave the state 90 days to comply with the federal law or face a lawsuit.

"North Carolina thrives when all of our voices are heard," said Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina. "Helping every qualified person register to vote should be a top priority for the state. It also happens to be the law."

Voting rights advocates say the federal law is important to enforce because it encourages voter participation from some of the state's poorest residents.

The groups also cited an investigation conducted last fall at 19 public offices in 11 counties in which voting rights advocates found that approximately 75 percent of about 200 individuals who visited public assistance offices were not provided an opportunity to register.

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[blm]

1. NC was the south's most progressive state. Within months NCGOP turned it into

one of the most regressive.

[G_j]

3. Gerrymandering Rigged the 2014 Elections for GOP Advantage

http://billmoyers.com/2014/11/05/gerrymandering-rigged-2014-elections-republican-advantage/

In the midterm elections, Republicans appear to have won their largest House majority since the Hoover administration. Republicans won on the weakness of Democratic candidates, a poor resource allocation strategy by Democratic party leaders, particularly DCCC chair Steve Israel, and an election narrative that did little to inspire base Democratic voters. That being said, in many ways, the game was rigged from the start. The GOP benefitted from the most egregious gerrymandering in American history.

As Rolling Stone reported, GOP donors plowed cash into state legislative efforts in 2010 for the very purpose of redrawing congressional lines. In the following year, as the tea party wave brought hundreds of Republicans into office, newly empowered Republican governors and state legislatures carved congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage. Democrats attempted this too, but only in two states: Maryland and Illinois. For the GOP however, strictly partisan gerrymandering prevailed in Ohio, Pennsylvania Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee and beyond.

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A similar dynamic played in North Carolina, another state in which GOP control in 2011 created intensely partisan congressional boundaries. In the 2014 midterm elections, Democrats in North Carolina secured only three out of 13 seats (23 percent of NC’s congressional delegation) even though Democratic candidates in that state won about 44 percent of the vote:


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[Omaha Steve]

2. Thanks for posting

K&R!

[Gothmog]

4. North Carolina is already in litigation and that litigation will be expanded

[blm]

5. Voting activists here have to work so much harder than most any other state.

When a state is purple leaning blue, but, gerrymandered to the extreme, the burden is extra heavy.

[Gothmog]

8. Things are not fun in Texas

I am dealing with the most restrictive voter id law in the country. We are fighting hard to change things but it is hard

[G_j]

6. Has NC's Governor Suppressed Thousands of Votes? | NC NAACP

May 11th, 2015 - Just weeks after the Supreme Court ordered that voting maps in North Carolina be reviewed for potential unethical redistricting, NC Board of Elections data reveals voter registration irregularities under Gov. McCrory's Administration that could have suppressed thousands of votes.

[Gothmog]

7. I have seen this video and the facts show that NC is suppressing voters

[marions ghost]

11. Standing with these fighters for Democracy in NC

"core responsibility of these social services agencies to ask if people have registered to vote..."

[G_j]

9. North Carolina Gov. McCrory's voter registration meltdown: latest developments

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/12/1384165/-North-Carolina-Gov-McCrory-s-voter-registration-meltdown-latest-developments?detail=email

Last Thursday (May 7) here at Daily Kos, I published the first public disclosure of a shocking collapse of the state's voter registration system here in North Carolina under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. Our analysis of State Board of Elections data revealed that, beginning on or about the time of McCrory's inauguration in January 2013, new voter registrations originating via the state's public assistance (welfare) offices had suddenly and inexplicably collapsed by 66%.

Federal law - specifically the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 - requires states to actively encourage and enable every patron of state offices, including public assistance and motor vehicles offices, to register to vote on the spot. The sudden meltdown in North Carolina's effort to do so, and its continuing failure for more than two years, right up to today, has been responsible for the possible disenfranchisement of up to 40,000 poverty-level citizens (and still counting).

In the four days since this story first broke here at Daily Kos, public awareness and media coverage of the scandal have both begun to snowball rapidly - thanks in no small measure to the many readers who shared it widely via Twitter, Facebook, email, and face-to-face, and legal actions to investigate and hold the perpetrators responsible have already begun. These fast-breaking reactions are summarized below.

North Carolina's chapter of the NAACP, under its inspiring leader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, has long been at the forefront of the fight for minority voting rights here in the Tarheel State, most recently by filing a lawsuit in federal courts seeking to overturn the state's (and Gov. McCrory's) worst-in-the-nation voter ID and voter suppression law, the Voter Information Verification Act. And so it should come as no surprise that NC-NAACP sprang into action as soon as it was alerted to this breaking story, rapidly coordinating with other voting rights organizations at both the state and national level to respond forcefully to these revelations. Those efforts resulted, on May 8th (just one day after the story broke here), in a coalition of groups including Demos, Project Vote, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Southern Coalition for Social Justice, with an able assist by Democracy NC, submitting a warning letter to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services informing them that North Carolina was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, and threatening the state with possible legal action.

The coalition's letter included a stunning summary of evidence its members have been collecting, via face-to-face interviews at state public assistance offices, since October of last year, documenting that 75% of visitors to state public assistance offices are never asked if they would like to register to vote (in violation of the National Voter Registration Act), as well as that many North Carolina public assistance offices don't even stock voter registration application forms - evidence which both validates and offers an explanation for the registration collapse I reported here at Daily Kos.

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[octoberlib]

10. K&R! Thanks, G_J