NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD Sunday, October 9, 2022
385th WEEKLY EDITION
This is a weekly feature of North Carolina Blue. We hope this weekly platform gives readers interested in North Carolina politics a place to share their knowledge, insight and inspiration as we take back our state from some of the most extreme Republicans in the nation. Please join us every week. You can also join the discussion in four other weekly State Open Threads.
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POSTED COVID data 9/11/2022 1:00pm EDT North Carolina
Click here for Covid-19 data from Worldometer Real Time World Statistics.
Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active
10/2 3,198,866 26,525 N/A N/A
10/9 3,210,837 26,852 3,162,086 21,899
Track NC Covid Data Track NC Vaccine Data
Please jump the fold for links to recent stories and opinion.
NC Policy Watch, Lynn Bonner, 10/7/2022
As the Wake County Board of Elections neared the end of its first tally of mail-in ballots this week, Marian Lewin rose from her seat in the audience to ask about the totals. How many ballots were approved? Were any “spoiled,” requiring ballots be reissued?
Lewin, first vice-president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, is committed to watching Wake election board actions as part of the organization’s plan to keep an eye on local boards statewide to make sure no legitimate ballots end up in the ‘reject’ pile.
The League wants to recruit volunteers who will report on ballot counts, challenges, and rejections.
This election season is like no other, operating under the cloud of widespread disinformation that grew from the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Self-appointed election enforcers are preparing to challenge ballots. Voting rights advocates are on high alert.
State Republicans wanted elections officials to be able to question mail-in ballots based on a comparison of witness and voter signatures with voter registration cards. That request for signature verification was rejected, but there’s a worry the request created an atmosphere in which election board members will raise unwarranted suspicions. The pressure might filter to elections staff, Lewin said, resulting in more ballot rejections. Local election boards meet periodically before Election Day to examine absentee ballot envelopes and count how many approved ballots they’ve received. Votes aren’t counted until Election Day.
BlueNC/WRAL, 10/9/2022
Among a significant share of Republicans it has become an article of faith – NOT FACT – that elections are not fair. Yet, these same people – particularly many of the party’s candidates for office – have yet to come up with a shred of proof to take their articles of faith and transcend them into indisputable facts. This has to stop! Elections aren’t reality game shows.
They are the essential element by which citizens have the fundamental voice in how their government works. It is damaging to our democracy for people – particularly those who wish to hold elected positions of representation and responsibility – to spread fallacies that do little more than baselessly breed distrust. How can anyone offer themselves up for elective office who contends the system by which they hope to gain office is not fair? The reality is that, with such a contention, they disqualify themselves.
By mid-2020, Trump knew there was a good chance he would lose the election. So he started "prepping" his followers to challenge that loss, in an effort to cheat his way into a 2nd term. It was bad enough that Q-Anon nutters and traitorous militia attacked Congress, but when many of those elected officials went on to vote against honoring the election results, our democracy was genuinely threatened. This is the chance for voters to send them home for good.
https://www.wral.com/editorial-dishonesty-reigns-among-election-deniers/20509633/
NC Policy Watch, Kelan Lyons, 10/5/2022
Elections week continues at the state’s high court as justices weigh another appeal involving redistricting.
The North Carolina Supreme Court wrestled once again with the issues of redistricting and gerrymandering on Tuesday in a case in which Republican lawmakers contend they should be allowed to draw maps however they choose, regardless of whether they dilute the voting power of people casting a ballot in favor of Democrats.
“The court should defer to the General Assembly when it makes those policy decision unless they make obviously wrong decisions,” Phillip Strach, the lawyer representing the GOP, argued before the justices.
It is not the first time the state Supreme Court has heard the case. In February, the justices ordered the legislature to redraw congressional, state House, and state Senate districts that the majority ruled were unconstitutional because they impermissibly weakened votes for Democrats and favored Republican candidates. (The court’s three Republican justices disagreed and dissented.) The court’s opinion did not explicitly lay out how to draw the maps, but mentioned five different metrics used by redistricting experts, and said some combination of those would pass constitutional muster.
Later that month a panel of Superior Court judges replaced the Republican-drawn map for the state’s congressional districts with its own. The panel also decided that the state House and Senate plans that the legislature adopted met the constitutional standards set by the state Supreme Court.
Jasmine Beach-Ferrara faces an uphill battle against her opponent, Republican Chuck Edwards, in a district won by former President Trump by 10 points in 2020.
The Hill, Brooke Migdon, 9/19/2022
Democrat Jasmine Beach-Ferrara is putting LGBTQ+ issues front and center in her campaign as she seeks to become the first openly lesbian woman to represent North Carolina in the House. Beach-Ferrara faces an uphill battle at best to win her general election race against Republican Chuck Edwards in a district won by former President Trump by 10 points in 2020.
But in an interview with Changing America, she made it clear she sees her campaign as a chance to shine a light on attacks on young LGBTQ+ people in the South and in North Carolina — a state where that issue has been a battleground for years.
“We’re living through a moment when two things are true: There are unprecedented levels of support for LGBTQ people and youth in the South, but we’re also seeing, in many ways, an unprecedented level of political attack, particularly on LGBTQ youth,” said Beach-Ferrara, who is 47 years old.
Jasmine Beach-Ferrara
I’m running because Western North Carolina deserves much better leadership than we've been getting.
Mark Meadows represented this district before he left the post to go be Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Madison Cawthorn has used his position to promote dangerous extremism and build his brand of toxic politics in order to become a celebrity on the fringes of the far-right. Chuck Edwards represents more of the same, and is out of step with the values of our community. Now this is one of the most competitive districts in North Carolina and we have a huge opportunity to offer a new kind of leadership grounded in empathy, compassion and doing what’s right by our neighbors.
I consider it a privilege to represent this area as a county commissioner. My wife and I are raising our three kids here. I am deeply invested in the success of our region and I see firsthand the urgent needs of our communities everyday. And I’m running to show up and work every day to figure out ways to make things better for the people of WNC.
An organizer to my core, I’m building a campaign that will connect with voters in every corner of the district. That means knocking on doors of people who haven’t heard from a campaign in years, talking to folks who have disengaged from the political process because it seems like elected officials don’t care about their lives, and bringing new people into the process. Our campaign is based on the core values of love, hope, empathy and how we move forward together.
In Congress, I will go to work every day focusing on delivering on early childhood education, responding to the opioid crisis, protecting family farms and expanding economic opportunity—and representing the people and values of WNC.
Facing South, Gregory D. Smithers, 10/6/2022
Water crises continue to make daily headlines across the United States. From polluted drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi, to a megadrought gripping the American West, it is clear that the decisions of the past are impacting the present and shaping our collective future. The age of human-induced climate change, which scholars dub "the Anthropocene," is exposing a history of systemic racism when it comes to accessing safe drinking water.
Juanita Wilson is determined to do something about this. A member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), Wilson wants the rivers flowing through her community in Cherokee, North Carolina, to "breathe again," as she put it. To make this happen, she's spearheading a community movement that brings Indigenous knowledge to the forefront of efforts to tackle river pollution. She launched Honoring Long Man Day, which Cherokees will celebrate on Oct. 19 for the second year in a row. The event, which is named after Cherokees' concept of a river as a living being, is as much a call to environmental action as it is a celebration of Cherokee history and culture.
The EBCI has been making major contributions to the renewal of forests and freshwater rivers and streams in Southern Appalachia. Foremost is the implementation of some of the highest water quality standards in the U.S., with the tribe using modern science to provide Cherokees with clean drinking water. But in doing so, the EBCI is not turning away from its traditions — a living history that connects the community to a rich archive of environmental knowledge. In fact, Wilson is keeping Cherokee traditions alive through her work.
Thanks for reading and contributing, I hope you have a successful week.