For those who have had enough Coronavirus news for the moment, here’s something else to get your blood pressure elevated. The GOP and their proxies are working hard to suppress the votes of anyone they think will challenge their power at the ballot box come November. Now that effort has been extended to another swing state with a new lawsuit filed in North Carolina.
Judicial Watch, the right-wing “accountability” group that has been a hit-piece organ of the GOP since it’s inception, is now suing the state of North Carolina and two of its largest counties in an attempt to force a purge of their voter rolls. The suit is based on a rather loose reading of the National Voter Registration Act, using the excuse that the state and counties have failed to provide Judicial Watch with the data they requested on voter rolls as the excuse to file suit. The group claims to be attempting to enforce the voter maintenance requirements of the NVRA and force the two counties to increase the number of voters purged from their rolls. The essential claim is that Mecklenburg and Guilford counties have failed to purge voters who are ineligible from their roles and have excessive numbers of registered voters. But, as we might expect, what Judicial Watch is basing this accusation on is dubious at best, as the story in the Raleigh News and Observer points out:
Judicial Watch says Mecklenburg and Guilford were among 378 counties nationwide that it claims have “implausibly high” voter-registration rates.
Mecklenburg, the complaint alleges, has more than 116,000 inactive voters on its rolls who should be removed. According to Judicial Watch, that means the state’s most populous county had 7 percent more registered voters than voting-age residents 18 and older.
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According to Judicial Watch, Mecklenburg is lagging in updating its voter list. It claims the state’s biggest county removed an average of 11,000 voters per year during the last reporting period.
Dickerson says the county actually removed almost 59,000 names in 2019 alone.
He also disputed Judicial Watch’s claim that Mecklenburg has more registered voters than voting-age residents. Based on 2018 Census estimate, Mecklenburg had almost 1.1 million residents, of which some 835,000 were 18 and older.
About 88 percent, or 732,000 residents, are registered to vote — not the 107 percent alleged by the complaint, he said.
Fortunately, the push-back to Judicial Watch’s allegations has been strong. The state Board of Elections and the county boards are all in the hands of Democrats (since the successful lawsuit to overturn an earlier GOP effort to rig them in favor of their own party despite the election of a Democratic governor) and are answering the lawsuit as we would hope all such suppression efforts are resisted. They also have the support of some serious outside legal muscle in the form of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
Given how the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the election year into chaos, one of the state’s leading voter advocates derided the timing of the lawsuit in strong terms.
“Pushing a voter purge and voter suppression, well it’s despicable even when there’s not a global pandemic. When there is, it’s something else entirely,” said Allison Riggs, interim executive director and chief counsel for voting rights for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham.
“If their data wasn’t bad — and it is absolutely bad — it would still be morally bankrupt to file this at a time when we’re trying to figure out how people can safely register and vote.”
She said Judicial Watch’s lawsuit uses “widely debunked” numbers that inflate the number of registered voters but do not reflect population changes in fast-growing counties such as Mecklenburg, leading to inaccurately high ratios of voters to residents.
It’s worth noting that the two counties targeted (Mecklenburg and Guilford) have relatively large African-American populations. Only Durham and Cumberland counties have higher percentages, but both have smaller populations than Mecklenburg and Guilford. Both counties are also Democratic strongholds. This makes clear that this is, once again, an attempt by the GOP to suppress African-American votes in North Carolina, just as were their earlier efforts to impose strict voter ID laws and limit the number of early voting locations when they controlled the boards of election.
The real question is going to be how far this lawsuit goes and what disruptions it will be able to cause. It may be that the whole thing will be dismissed for a lack of standing. It may also be that the country boards of election will be able to get summary judgement by presenting their voter roll numbers to the judge and thus proving the Judicial Watch accusations to be baseless. We can only hope that this will be the outcome of this suit. The threat it represents to a fair and valid election in North Carolina this November is too great to allow it to continue or succeed. If you can,
send support to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice to help fight the good fight and keep eligible voters on the rolls in North Carolina.