The Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force (an arm of the local Democratic Party) is having to fight their voting battles yet again. In spite of the fact that they (amazingly!) won a lawsuit in the Wake County, NC Superior Court to restore a polling site on the Appalachian State University campus in Boone, NC and the fact that early voting starts next Thursday, Watauga County still doesn't know if they will prevail. That's because the State Board of Elections is determined to keep that from happening -- so determined that they intend to appeal this all the way to the NC State Supreme Court! They have managed to obtain a temporary injunction from the Court of Appeals until Tuesday, even though the Superior Court Judge in the case, Wake County's Donald Stephens, refused to give them one.
All I can say is, the State Board Members are certainly revealing their hands. They have heard appeal after appeal on this issue by the Democratic member of the Watauga County Board of Elections (over the past year since they took office) to have a campus early-voting site. Reams of evidence that the site is needed and hundreds of emails and letters and attempts by the public to make their preference for this site known to the SBE -have been to no avail. Each time they have turned it down on pretexts.
Now they are saying that it will cause irreparable harm if they open another voting site where students can easily vote! This is ridiculous. The local Board of Elections Executive Director has only to send four already-hired poll workers to the new site. She is perfectly happy to do this, but these appeals are making it harder for her to plan because we are running out of time. In any case, the State Board's pretexts don't work anymore. They have revealed their total and unyielding partisanship for all to see. They also have shown by their current appeal that they believe that the citizens of North Carolina have no right to legally question their decisions! We, however, still believe that we are in the right and we will at some point prevail, no matter what happens next week. Please vote everyone! That is the only way we can counter these kinds of power grabs and injustices. And we can't risk getting any more Supreme Court Justices to join those who have shown themselves cynically willing to keep millions of people from the polls. Here's a link: http://www.wral.com/...