Dem
53
Ties
2
GOP
45
North Carolina has been particularly aggressive in strategically eliminating polling sites, ostensibly in the service of "budget concerns." The real goal, of course, is to make it harder for certain Democratic-leaning constituencies to vote. And the reason that North Carolina is in the vanguard, as it were, is that while the state's population is roughly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the state Senate is 60% Republicans, the state House is 59% Republicans, and the state Supreme Court is 71% Republicans. Keeping Democrats from voting is the most effective way for the GOP to hold onto a disproportionate share of power.
In previous elections, college students have been able to vote at polling places on campus. However, a bunch of those were removed for this election, at the behest of the legislature. That includes the polling places at North Carolina A&T, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Western Carolina University, Bennett College and Elon University. Is it a coincidence that those schools all have above-average Black enrollment? Of course not. Student votes are disproportionately Democratic, Black student votes even more so.
Someone who has studied their history, even cursorily, might be leery of mucking around with students from the city of Greensboro, in particular. That was a hotbed of Civil Rights Movement protest and was, of course, the site of a very famous lunch counter sit-in. But today's Republican politicians don't study their history. Actually, it's more accurate to say that they actively try to rewrite history. Something else they have in common with the Soviet Union.
Anyhow, the spirit of protest has not waned at those universities. And so, the campus College Democrats chapters, backed by the Michelle Obama-founded When We All Vote, filed suit in February, asserting that the choices made by the legislature are discriminatory and violate the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The wheels of justice turn slowly, however, and so the lawsuit is still waiting for adjudication.
This being the case, students at all four schools moved on to Plan B. They have founded an organization called Protect Ours, which runs shuttles that take students to the polls. Many students, including most who live on campus, don't have cars, and the nearest polling places are located multiple miles away.
On top of that—keep in mind what we said about the spirit of protest—campus leaders organized a demonstration on the first day of early voting, which was October 15. On each campus, several hundred students marched from their campus to their nearest polling place, while news cameras captured the scene:
The spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. is alive and well in North Carolina. And given the raison d'être of this site, we struggle to think of any story that is more worthy of freudenfreude than people demanding their right to vote, especially young people.
Have a good weekend, all! (Z)