Democracy dodged a near-extinction level event in North Carolina last week.
By a 4-to-3 decision along party lines, on Friday the State Supreme Court overturned a law that had been rushed into being by legislative Republicans just as the state’s new Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, was being sworn into office. That bill rejiggered the composition of the voting membership of the state’s powerful Boards of Elections. It replaced a long-standing system in which a majority of board members were chosen from the serving governor’s party with a new system, in which each board would be composed of equal numbers of Democratic and Republican members.
Advertised by Republicans as a “bipartisan” alternative to the old way of running elections in North Carolina, it was in fact a land mine waiting quietly to blow up election administration across the state in November. By changing the boards from an odd number of voting members to an even number...without providing a mechanism to resolve tie votes...the new law virtually assured that county and state boards of elections would deadlock along party lines when attempting to decide issues with any partisan implications, thus bringing election administration to a complete standstill.
In North Carolina, each county’s Board of Elections designs its own Early Voting plan every election year, detailing how many polling places will be provided, where they will be located, their hours of operation, and for how many days they will be open during the state’s 17-day long Early Voting period. In the past, when a Republican occupied the governor’s office (and Republicans thus outnumbered Democrats on county and state boards of elections), many county boards would do their best to curtail Early Voting by slashing the number of polling places and their days and hours of operation and moving those polling places further away from voters of color. Conversely, when a Democratic governor was in power, Democratic-controlled boards would boost the number of polling places and their days and hours, and move them closer to urban concentrations of voters of color and college students. Both sides in this tug-of-war were motivated by the statistical fact that Democratic voters prefer to vote early, while Republican voters mostly vote on Election Day. Republicans who wish to suppress Democratic voters (more than half of whom are people of color in North Carolina) despise Early Voting.
The new law presented Democrats with a desperate threat. Not only would we lose our turn to run the boards of elections, but we faced the prospect of a deadly Hobson’s Choice in 2018 and beyond. Republican county board members (famed for their brutal hardball politics here in North Carolina) would engineer deadlocks by voting as a bloc against any reasonable Early Voting plan. And that deadlock at the county level would kick the issue up to the State Board of Elections (likewise having an even number of voting members, half Democrats and half Republicans) for resolution...where it would again meet deadlock. And in that case, long-standing law dictates that the hapless county’s Early Voting plan would default to what I have called “the statutory minimum plan:” a single polling place per county, open only on weekdays and only from 8 AM to 5 PM.
The image at the top of this article illustrates the impact of such a Republican-engineered default to the statutory minimum plan. In the case shown here (Mecklenburg County, the state’s largest, and majority-Democratic), 2016’s 22 Early Voting sites, well-distributed across the county and open long hours, would be reduced to just a single site that would face the impossible task of serving 685,000 voters.
In short, Early Voting would have been brought to a standstill under the Republican law overturned last week by the state Supreme Court.
The court’s wise decision (on a 4-to-3 party line vote) was made possible by the (some would say ‘freak’) 2016 election of African American jurist Michael Morgan (D) to the state’s highest court. Without diminishing Justice Morgan’s impressive professional credentials and qualifications, it is fair to say that in an election year marked by a strong white supremacy vote and a big win for Trump, Morgan’s election had as much to do with the fact that, alone among all Democratic candidates, Morgan’s name appeared at the top of the ballot for his contest, and it seems that many Republican voters therefore assumed he was a Republican, did not know he is African American, and so reflexively ticked the box beside his name, thus handing him a big surprising win and switching the Supreme Court from a Republican majority to a Democratic one.
State-level races matter more than many people think. Without Morgan’s win, North Carolina today would almost certainly be facing the death of early voting via an insidious Republican voter suppression trick. Instead, we can now look forward to 2018 and 2020 Early Voting plans featuring ample hours and voting sites tailored to the needs of working folks and students.
This was a big win for democracy.
Help us add yet another fantastically qualified African American to the state supreme court bench this year: please consider donating to the campaign of my good friend and the founder of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the awe-inspiring Anita Earls.
