As Laura Clawson noted earlier The New York Times spent some pixels speculating on the early vote, including this snippet: "there were signs of weakness over the weekend, especially among African-Americans in North Carolina, where the turnout as of Saturday night showed that they had not voted at their 2012 levels so far," eventually followed by "because the state significantly curtailed early voting." Yeah, they did. And critical follow-up from Bill Busa shows just what's going on here.
In the 58 counties that have been plagued by neither flooding nor locked polling place doors (Unimpaired Counties) African Americans are voting at 91% of their 2012 rate—not great, but a definite improvement over the statewide rate of just 82%. By contrast, among the 32 counties for which federal disaster declarations are in effect, that rate drops substantially to just 79%. But the man-made disaster of voter suppression proves to be the most potent force of all, depressing the African American voting rate to a mere 72% of 2012’s performance. Interestingly, flooding and voter suppression aren’t additive: among the 7 counties doubly cursed by both, voting action is again 72%. Actually, that makes sense: if there’s no open polling place within a reasonable distance, it hardly matters whether or not a voter is surrounded by water. […]
The take-home lesson here is that Mother Nature hath no fury like a Republican pol scorned: while flooding of biblical proportions certainly hasn’t helped voter turnout, this year voter suppression appears to substantially outstrip Hurricane Matthew as a force depressing North Carolina’s African American vote. Of course, it still must be explained why black voting is also slightly down in the state’s unimpaired counties, and here a variety of factors are no doubt at play, ranging from mild voter disengagement to forms of voter suppression more subtle than locked polling place doors.
Things like the voter purge the North Carolina NAACP is now using, where the GOP is using voter caging to knock several thousand voters off the rolls.
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Voter caging is when a party—always the Republicans—sends out AV huge mailing in order to identify voters who might not still be at their home mailing address, and whose mail is returned as undeliverable.
Remarkably, the majority of voters challenged this way tend to be people of color who vote Democratic. Like 100-year-old Grace Bell Hardison, whose vote was challenged this fall—and who raised hell with local media to shame the Republican trying to take her vote away. This tactic of voter caging, by the way, is one of the reasons why the Republican National Committee has been curtailed by a consent decree since 1981 limiting its activity at polling places.
Closing early voting sites primarily in counties with large populations of people of color. Requiring voter ID. Limiting early voting hours. There are myriad ways in which Republicans can suppress the vote, and North Carolina has seen pretty much all of them. You want to know why the early vote among black folks is down in North Carolina? It's not a mystery.