Dem
47
GOP
53
Now let's move on to election rigging. By Republicans, in North Carolina. Republicans on state and county election boards are running a precision two-pronged offense against Democrats voting. In Jackson, Pasquotank and Wake Counties, election officials closed voting sites on college campuses, making it more difficult and confusing for students to vote. College students skew heavily Democratic, so closing their voting sites could reduce the statewide count for Democrats.
In Pasquotank County, Sunday voting has been eliminated. The Republican officials who decided this know exactly what they were doing. Many Black churches organize "souls to the polls" events after church services on Sunday. The pastors tell people that they should vote right after services. Buses are chartered to take people to the polls right after services. White churches don't do this. By banning Sunday voting, this long-standing practice is killed off.
Note the precision the Republicans are using here. They have adopted rules that basically only target heavily Democratic groups. The mastermind behind the changes is state auditor Dave Boliek, who had Donald Trump's endorsement in 2024. He hired Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, to pressure county boards to make the changes. Woodhouse told county officials that if they did not comply with his directives Boliek would fire them.
Woodhouse also got county boards to reduce the hours for early voting. He claimed it was fair because some counties increased Saturday hours. Nice try, but synagogues don't do "souls to the polls." Only Black churches do that. Speaking of fairness, Woodhouse also got county boards to close polling sites in Black areas and open new ones in white areas. He knew exactly what he was hired to do. All this is part of a nationwide effort to rig elections in favor of Republicans. Oddly enough, when Donald Trump talks about rigged elections, he never seems to mention things that are actually happening on the ground. He prefers to talk about things going on only in his mind.
Gov. Josh Stein (D-NC) was furious about all this. He said: "It is clear that the auditor's staff person, who was the former executive director of the Republican Party, has been interfering with and directing local county boards of elections on how to shape their early voting plans, and that's just wrong." The governor can't do much about it, because the Republican-controlled state legislature took the authority to appoint members of the state election board from the governor and gave it to the state auditor—the only state where the auditor has power over elections.
This kind of gamesmanship happens for two reasons. First, elections are controlled by partisan politicians—usually the elected secretary of state, in North Carolina by the auditor (because the Republican-controlled legislature knew the SoS was a Democrat and the auditor was a Republican). Second, Republicans know they can get away with it because Democrats tend to be "good government" types and don't misuse their power when they have it. A state with a Democratic trifecta could pass a law stating that any county with fewer than [X] registered voters gets only one polling place, in the county seat. The claim could be that closing polling places in small towns with hardly any voters saves the taxpayers money. The real reason, of course, would be to make voting much more difficult for rural voters and thus hurt the Republicans. Democrats don't play this game. Maybe to get Republicans to stop this stuff, they will have to.
We can imagine at least two schemes for running fair elections. One is to have nonpartisan civil servants run them, the way it works in nearly all other democracies. Another way is to have a state election board with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. For example, the majority and minority leaders of each chamber of the legislature could select one board member. Then all decisions would have to be bipartisan. (V)