In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described state governments as “laboratories of democracy,” in which
a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
But today’s flying monkeys — like ALEC and the Koch brothers’ well-oiled machine — exist specifically to ensure that the rest of the Union can no longer remain insulated from any one Red state’s maddest science experiments gone horribly awry.
Which is why the fate that North Carolina Republicans have planned for our state’s election system in 2018 should concern not only Tar Heels, but every friend of democracy. Because as things stand right now, the state GOP is on a course to obliterate one of the truly great electoral innovations of our time: Early Voting. And if they succeed here, that same mad science will be coming to your state soon.
This is the story of an imminent threat to democracy that you haven’t heard elsewhere, because putting its pieces together requires a bit more digging than the typical pundit is willing to muster. But join with me as I try to make it easy to understand, with a little help from the progressive data scientists at Insightus.
North Carolina’s new Elections And Ethics Enforcement Act (SB68; rushed into law last month over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, and currently under court challenge) has been too little reported on and, when it is, almost always for the wrong reasons. It is most often derided by critics for the way it switches the powerful chairmanship of the State Board of Elections, every two years, back and forth between a Democrat and a Republican...with Republicans conveniently set to take the helm in every presidential election year. But that obvious cheat is small potatoes compared to the law’s most insidious and least well understood provision: expanding the number of members on the State Board of Elections from its previous five to its new eight voting members — four Democrats and four Republicans, all of them highly partisan political appointees.
There’s a reason why the U.S. Supreme Court has nine justices instead of ten, why the Vice President becomes the 101st Senate vote in case of a tie, and — more generally — why nearly every sort of voting body comprises an odd number of voting members rather than an even number: to insure against deadlocks due to tie votes. It’s basic arithmetic: a majority vote (and, thus, a decision of some sort) is guaranteed to be achieved in a body with an odd number of voting members, but not so among an even number, where deadlock becomes a distinct threat. Yet in the thinly veiled name of ‘bipartisanship’ NC Republicans’ new election law creates an even-numbered State Board of Elections, while intentionally failing to provide a mechanism for breaking the tie votes that must inevitably result.
In short, SB68 re-jiggers the State Board of Elections to ensure its failure to arrive at critical election-related decisions.
SB68 Heralds The Death of Early Voting In NC
Why on earth would Republicans do that? After all, Republican candidates have as much to lose from a paralyzed electoral system as do Democratic candidates...don’t they?
No, they don’t — or at least they’re betting they don’t. Because among the many sorts of critical decisions the State Board is tasked with by law, few are as frequently encountered, or as potentially consequential, as are decisions regarding the state’s Early Voting plan. And Republicans despise Early Voting, because conventional wisdom (if not actual research) holds that by making voting more convenient, Early Voting boosts turnout among students, the working poor, and voters of color — Democrats’ key voter base. By contrast, an abundance of data compellingly demonstrates that NC Republicans (who are more likely to be older, wealthier, and more often retired...in short, to have more free time and better mobility) turn out to vote in greatest numbers on Election Day itself.
North Carolina law establishes a unique ‘anything goes’ approach to Early Voting. Each of the state’s one hundred counties establishes its own idiosyncratic plan each election year (an Early Voting ‘plan’ comprises the number of Early Voting sites the county will offer, where they will be located, and what days and hours they’ll be open during the state’s 17-day Early Voting period). A county can offer as many polling places as it wishes; the only hard-and-fast requirement being that it must offer at least one Early Voting polling site (usually the county Board of Elections office), open on weekdays only, and only during customary business hours. Below, I’ll refer to that bare-bones requirement as the statutory minimum plan.
How a Voting Plan Becomes a Reality Under Current Law
County boards of elections meet in June through August of election years to adopt their Early Voting plans. Those boards are comprised of three voting members — currently two Republican appointees and one Democrat. Typically the hyper-partisan Republican members propose an extremely restrictive plan (too few sites open far too few hours), while the board’s Democrat proposes a more reasonable plan.
By law, a county board can adopt one of those competing plans only by unanimous vote, which frequently doesn’t happen (in 2016, about a third of NC’s 100 county boards failed to unanimously adopt a plan). And in that event, the responsibility for a county plan is kicked upstairs to the State Board of Elections which, before the passage of SB68, could impose its own plan on a county by a simple majority vote of its five members.
How That Could Fail Under the New Law
You probably see where this is going. Under prior law, a final decision regarding a county plan was certain to be reached — if not at the county board level, then certainly at the state board level. But under SB68 all bets are off, because now the newly reconstituted State Board (with its eight voting members) can deadlock too, in an unresolved 4-4 tie vote. And when it does, that leaves the county in question with no other choice but to implement the woefully inadequate statutory minimum plan: a single polling place per county, open only during weekday business hours — that is to say, a plan that is nearly useless for working poor voters, students, and folks who rely on public transportation.
Here are a few illustrations of just how dramatically those impending deadlocks will alter the face of Early Voting in North Carolina, courtesy of Insightus’s EVE (the North Carolina Early Voting Evaluator app). First, compare 2016’s Early Voting map (top panel) with what the map will look like if county and state boards of elections deadlock under SB68 in 2018 (bottom panel):
The red dots are individual polling places. Sensibly enough, in 2016 the state’s most populous counties (indicated here by darker shades) all offered large numbers of Early Voting polling places. But if counties are forced to fall back to the statutory minimum plan under the onslaught of SB68, 2016’s 444 Early Voting sites will be slashed to just 100 sites in 2018 — a 77% decrease in polling places.
In 2016 the state’s most populous and urban county of all, Mecklenburg (at lower left in the maps above), which is home to over 700,000 voters and breaks 2:1 Democratic, offered a barely adequate 22 Early Voting sites (red dots) across its 545 square miles. Under the statutory minimum plan that might befall it under SB68, Mecklenburg would get just one Early Voting site — exactly the same number as the state’s smallest county (tiny, rural Tyrrell, with just 2,500 voters). The likely result — which the legislators who pushed SB68 into law are banking on — could be a Republican landslide in heavily Democratic urban counties like Mecklenburg when the poor, the young, and those with limited transport options (i.e., a significant fraction of the Democratic base) simply can’t vote, while affluent and retired whites (the Republican base) continue to vote as they always have, (i.e., mostly on Election Day).
So Far Away
Here’s how the statutory minimum plan would impact a typical voter’s distance-to-poll — the straight-line distance between a voter’s residential address and the nearest polling place in her county (here again we use Mecklenburg County as an example).
As the top panel illustrates, in 2016 the majority of Mecklenburg’s voters lived within 0 to 2 miles of an Early Voting polling place, and essentially none lived more than 6 miles away from one. But under the statutory minimum plan that Republican legislators are counting on for 2018, a majority of voters will find themselves 10 to 20 miles from a polling place. As we at Insightus have discussed in detail elsewhere, distance-to-poll has a profound effect on voter turnout...and particularly for the working poor. If you’re a parent working one or two low-wage jobs to keep your kids fed and clothed, and especially if you rely on public transportation, it’s simply impossible to find the time during the work week to make a 40 mile round trip to vote (plus waiting in a very long, very slow line at the polls). Large distance-to-poll numbers, like those under the state’s statutory minimum plan, are a brutally effective means of disenfranchising working poor voters.
So Many Voters, So Little Time
But daunting travel distances won’t be the only impediment to Early Voting in 2018 if NC’s Republicans have their way. An even more significant barrier will be presented to voters by that most precious of all human resources: time.
NC’s Early Voting plan provided voters with over 42,000 total site-hours of voting opportunities in 2016 (total site-hours are the sum of all sites’ open hours over the entire 17 days of Early Voting). If Board deadlocks impose the statutory minimum plan across NC in 2018, Early Voting’s total site-hours will plummet to just about 9,600 hours statewide — a mere 23% of 2016’s hours.
Worse still will be the impact on voters in the state’s most populous (and typically most Democratic) counties. As the table below shows, in NC’s seven largest counties (home to 40% of the state’s voters) total site-hours would be slashed to single-digit fractions of 2016’s numbers if county and state boards deadlock in 2018.
COUNTY |
2018 TOTAL SITE-HOURS
(% OF 2016’s Hours)
IF County & State
BOARDS DEADLOCK
|
Mecklenburg |
4% |
Wake |
5% |
Guilford |
4% |
Forsyth |
9% |
Durham |
7% |
Cumberland |
9% |
Buncombe |
5% |
It’s hardly hyperbole to speak of “the death of Early Voting in North Carolina” when almost half of the state’s voters could suffer 90+% reductions in site-hours if Republican state legislators have their way.
Which is, of course, a big part of the whole idea behind North Carolina’s SB68 and its cynical plot to hamstring the State Board of Elections.
How to Fight This
SB68 isn’t quite yet the law of the land here in North Carolina. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is challenging the new law in Wake County Superior Court — the first step in what will likely be a chain of appeals ascending all the way to the state Supreme Court.
If in the end we lose in the court of law, conventional get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts would, by themselves, be a sadly inadequate form of resistance. Even if GOTV could deliver streams of buses filled with voters at risk of suppression (and 2016’s experience in NC proves it cannot), that effort would be fruitless if there aren’t enough polling places and voting booths to serve all of those would-be voters.
In that case then, we must also fight in the court of public opinion — and there we might actually hope to win. Recent North Carolina history has shown time and again that when local voting rights activists and concerned citizens pack county Board of Elections meetings they can frequently shame Republican board members into doing something at least approximating the right thing. This is so because many of those Republican board members are, as a friend puts it, “white-haired socialites” who accept board appointments “because they’re looking to add another bullet point to their upcoming obituaries.” For the most part, these aren’t people who are OK with being publicly branded as racists and enemies of democracy. So we must show up and call their actions what they are — voter suppression — loudly, publicly, and ceaselessly — and deliver them the public shaming their anticipated action or inaction would so richly deserve.
Second, any party that champions voting rights must now get serious about effectively supporting its board of elections appointees. Too often in the past Democrats have been content to appoint members, give them a pat on the back and hearty best wishes, and then leave them to fight alone. On the new and deadly battlefield created by SB68, those folks will need all the help and advice they can get as they attempt to negotiate and win better voting plans. We at Insightus are doing our share to contribute to board member education by introducing EVE: North Carolina’s Early Voting Evaluator, but there’s much more support the party itself can offer its appointees.
Finally, we must have an effective Plan B in place, in case the worst-case scenario outlined here comes to pass and Early Voting all but disappears across North Carolina in 2018. Insightus will be active on this front in the coming election cycle, working to suggest to conventional voting rights organizations (whose thought processes can sometimes be a little hidebound) the new world of possibilities the 21st Century presents to voting rights activists who are committed to winning.
Fight like heaven, y’all.
Insightus (“Data-Driven Activism”) is data science for progressive change. It is powered by volunteer professionals from coast to coast, and by small donations from folks like you.