In 2012, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan defeated Barack Obama and Joe Biden by 92,004 votes in North Carolina. That was a landslide compared to 2008, when Obama/Biden bested McCain/Palin by a mere 14,177 votes in the Tarheel State. Obviously, it doesn’t take much to change the balance of power there, and that’s why the Republicans, who control the state house, the governorship, and most electoral boards, have worked diligently to suppress Democratic turnout in early voting.
Democrats may be off their 2012 levels not due to disengagement, but due to the availability of in-person early voting. Local electoral boards, with Republican majorities, created bottlenecks by reducing the number of in-person early voting polling locations. They did so at the urging of the Republican state party chair. Not all local boards listened, but some did, and the effect is obvious. The volume of early voting is generally down in the counties that reduced the number of polling locations and is up where the number increased.
To see how effective they can be, let’s look at just one county.
Perhaps the most egregious county is Guilford, a county of 517,600 people, of which 57.9 percent is White, and gave Obama 58 percent of the vote in 2012. The county opened 16 in-person early voting locations in 2012, but has only their central election office open in 2016. The number of in-person voters on the first Thursday and Friday was 21,560 in 2012, but was only 3,305 in 2016, a decrease of 18,255 or 85 percent.
A quick back of the envelope calculation reveals that a Democrat carrying 57.9% of 18,255 votes would net 7,685. So, in one county, in only two days, the Republicans theoretically erased more than 50% of Obama/Biden’s 2008 margin of victory. Now, translate that to other counties all across the state and you begin to see how reducing the number of early voting locations can easily change the outcome of the election.
Mecklenburg, where the state’s largest city Charlotte is located and a county Obama won with 61 percent of the vote, decreased their number of polling locations from 22 to 10. The effect was not as pronounced as Guilford. The number of in-person voters on the first Thursday and Friday was 29,068 in 2012, and was 26,660 in 2016, a decrease of 2,426 or 8 percent.
This is happening despite North Carolina getting slapped in July by a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which found their voter suppression scheme was enacted in 2013 with “discriminatory intent” that “target[s] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The same court denied an appeal last week that accused North Carolina of not honoring the July ruling and requested more early voting time and locations.
Overall, the numbers out of North Carolina still look troubling for Donald Trump:
Republicans have been less engaged than 2012 during the entire mail balloting period, and this pattern persists through to in-person early voting. As of Saturday, Republicans are running behind their 2012 levels by 26,324 returned ballots for a 13 percent decrease from 2012. ..
…Clinton has a narrow lead in the North Carolina polling averages, and Democrats are still engaged at higher levels than Republicans. I imagine that the Clinton campaign is nervously watching these early voting numbers to see if voters in these heavily Democratic counties will engage once past the current bottleneck created by the shuttering polling locations at the beginning of the early voting period.
If the Democrats succeed in winning the presidency and Congress, they should make it a top priority to pass some kind of federal election overhaul that codifies what can and cannot be done to suppress voting. Yes, it’s obviously in their self-interest and of keen concern to constituencies whose franchise has been “targeted with surgical precision.” But it’s also the right thing to do and it would put an end to these shenanigans where legislatures and courts have as much to say about who wins federal elections as the actual voters.
When I praise Matt Stoller, you should pay attention. He’s all grown up now.
His piece should be read as a companion piece to my brother’s new feature article which I worked on all weekend to have ready for this morning.
No exaggeration to say that these are the most important articles for progressives to read that I’ve seen all year long.
LOL Indeed.
Hmm, interesting…
“For them, true laissez-faire required that government have a “positive program” of antitrust and other policies to keep monopolists from seizing markets and destroying their efficiency. The only alternative was an expanding regulatory state that would inevitably lead to some form of socialism or fascism. The best approach, argued Simons and other libertarians at the time, was a “night watchman state” that enforces contracts and guards against explicit theft, importantly including the theft that inevitably results when monopolists set prices and control production rather than free and open markets.”
vs captured the Dem solution of regulatory agencies. But DOJs can be captured, too, as we have seen.
I thought the articles were good, but we probably need to also ask why the voters turned away from anti-monopoly sentiment as well. I guess you could say that the liberal boomers who were raised in affluence didn’t think it was important any longer, but really I think the rise of the suburbs, especially those middle class ones that were filled with employees of corporations had something to do with that as well. Its difficult to run on an anti-big business agenda and appeal to people who actually work for big businesses. Its not like there was a conspiracy, say, to put a certain kind of Democrat on the top of the ticket. But the Democratic voters did that time and time again.
“…need to also ask why the voters turned away from anti-monopoly sentiment as well”
Which President ran on this issue?
Did the voters ever get a choice?
The takeaway quotes:
and
Perhaps we’ll transform back to the citizen sovereignty model…hopefully in about the time it took trickle-down, Reaganomics took to get us to where we are today, ie., the rest of my life.
I suspect climate change will have some input on that timeline.
“If the Democrats succeed in winning the presidency and Congress, they should make it a top priority to pass some kind of federal election overhaul that codifies what can and cannot be done to suppress voting. Yes, it’s obviously in their self-interest and of keen concern to constituencies whose franchise has been ‘targeted with surgical precision.’ But it’s also the right thing to do and it would put an end to these shenanigans where legislatures and courts have as much to say about who wins federal elections as the actual voters.”
How exactly would this be done without legislation that somehow reverses what the Supremes did when they gutted the Voting Rights Act? I mean, elections are run at the local level, right?
Good news:
Hillary has a solid lead in NC. The issue is the Senate seat, which currently polls as a toss-up.
Clinton’s lead isn’t that solid, especially when this many votes are being lost.
The Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act actually requires a different formula for determining who needs pre-clearance to change election laws. It doesn’t, by itself, gut the law, but it has that effect if Congress can’t make the anticipated revisions to the law.
To give an example, Republican James Sensenbrenner wants to revise the law to make it enforceable again, but his colleagues won’t let him because they want to be able to use the dormant enforcement mechanism as a loophole to suppress votes.
If a Democratic congress brought up a reform bill, a rump of Republicans would support it. Enough to pass it or overcome a filibuster, I believe. At least, if it made some concessions and didn’t become a vehicle that was seen as giving them an advantage over the status quo ante.
Assuming a Democratic Congress and a liberal majority SCOTUS for the foreseeable future, what are the Constitutional limits on Federal legislating how State elections should be run? Could the Federal Elections Commission be given over-arching authority to regulate Constituency revisions, voting methods, identification requirements, polling places and opening times? In European democracies, those sorts of organisational requirements are generally run on a non-partisan basis, to the point that gerrymandering and voter suppression generally isn’t an issue.
In our system, Congress has a lot of authority over how federal elections are run, and much less authority over how non-federal elections are run.
In practice, this creates tensions that our courts have to arbitrate.
So, in N.C., the governor’s race is in a different category from the Senate and presidential races.
Theoretically, North Carolina could have a voter ID requirement for the governor’s race but not for the others because a federal court told them to drop the voter ID requirement.
The Feds rely on state and local governments to run their elections, so if they impose a bunch of unfunded mandates on them they can wind up in court trying to explain how they can force people to spend money on election equipment or early voting centers, etc., when they could appropriate money for those purposes.
A liberal Supreme Court would never have gutting the preclearance portion of the Voting Rights Act and could be expected to rule differently in a future challenge, but the Congress probably still needs to revise the law to respond to the Court’s demands.
Presumably early voting by mail won’t cost more, and if it all comes down to money, a Federal law mandating sufficient funds to ensure certain minimal standards are met – e.g. voting hours, maximum queueing times, no. of vote centres per 100,000 registered voters etc. – could be drafted to ensure that sufficient funds were available – especially were fines were introduced where voters had to wait more than one hour.
I believe that federal laws only apply to federal elections but most states mimic so as not to have to pay for 2 different systems
Congress has very broad power to regulate the time, place and manner of federal elections under Art I sec. 4. It possesses “ultimate supervisory authority” as to federal elections.
The VRA provisions struck down by Roberts’ Repubs in Shelby County deal with Congress’ ability to monitor states with a past history of discrimination in voting. That (obviously politically-motivated and nakedly-partisan) ruling can be dealt with (in theory) as Booman relates, but of course Roberts calculated that our hopelessly paralyzed Congress will never pass new legislation relating to Congressional findings and oversight over historically discriminatory state governments.
But presumably we are talking about new, comprehensive federal legislation relating to voting procedures for federal elections that would apply across the nation, so the VRA and the 15th Amendment (as gutted by Roberts) wouldn’t really be needed. And of course we need a new Supreme Court majority to overturn the intellectually dishonest (and obviously factually mistaken) Shelby County ruling.
The main thing is tipping the Supreme Court liberal. No way a rational Court allows this kind of BS. This could be the election where we finally begin to turn the corner.
We need some voting standards. Time for a voting commission. They should be able to provide a formula for x number of registered voters with a ballot of x number of pages requires x number of polling places, poll workers and voting machines that results in the voter not standing in line for more than 30 min. Arm the dems counties in red states with some math to make their case in court.
At this point it’s almost impossible for the ordinary person to determine what legal regime is governing this election in NC. The GOP vote suppression scheme involving early voting was struck down by the 4th Circuit (and an equally divided Supreme Court could not take the case, if I remember right), but apparently nothing was put in its place, nor ordered. So the elections board in every county now seems entitled to do whatever the hell it wants. Perhaps Tarheel can comment if he’s so inclined.
It sure doesn’t look like there’s any statewide “uniform standard” in place governing early voting in NC–which the 5 conservative activists masquerading as justices decided was Florida’s critical failing in the Stolen Election of 2000. Early voting locations and hours seem to be all over the map, which causes confusion, of course. One might think that a single day of teevee reports of voters waiting 3 hours to vote would result in immediate changes, but not in NC (somehow).
Of course, Dems had complete control of the federal gub’mint in 2009 yet didn’t think they needed to pass a massive overhaul of federal election law at the time, despite it being obvious that vote suppression and ballot game-playing was going to be a critical strategy of the “conservative” movement going forward. No one could possibly think the Repub party favors elective democracy at this point in its history. Election reform should have been a critical component of Dem strategy from 2000 on, including the abolition of the absurd electoral college.
Yet here we are, watching the 4 hour lines form (as usual) in heavily Dem precincts. Early voting, election day voting, always the absurd mega-lines—which are absolutely and completely unnecessary given the tiny cost of elections in a state budget. They can only be intentional. The more things change, the more they stay the same….
as we know there wasn’t anything happening at the time
People argue that the Electoral College is archaic and they’re right. But, just think about how elections would be waged if we went to direct popular voting for President!
Would anybody campaign in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, or New Hampshire? Of course not! Despite all the tens of millions $ spent on Florida, the net result was Obama by 75,000 votes, less than 1%. The same’s true of all the battleground states. In the electoral college system, winning Ohio by 1% is the same as winning by 10%, but in a direct election it’s entirely different.
In a direct popular vote, Hillary would spend her days campaigning in California, New York and Illinois, because that’s where the greatest haul of votes are. Trump would campaign in Texas, Alabama and Kentucky, where the largest pool of unexploited GOP voters are.
In short, campaigns would be focused exclusively on the Reddest or Bluest large states where the greatest pool of untapped voters are. A massive registration and get out the vote effort in Los Angeles County would yield more net votes for Hillary than spending 10 times as much effort in Florida or Ohio.
The same thing would be true for Trump in Texas and Alabama and Arkansas.
Would this be good for America? Better than the current system? Instead of 6 to 10 battleground states, where at least the candidates fight it out, to Red and Blue “meat” campaigns designed to amp up the vote in large, red or blues states to 11.
We’ve already seen the Trump campaign, which is basically that: Trump has spent the entire campaign throwing red meat to the base and attacking the opposing base. And the one thing we can all agree on is that it was a horribly nasty and draining campaign. The least fun campaign in living memory. It feels more like the last stages of the Civil War to anything remotely like the campaigns we remember from history.
Hillary didn’t do that because she was focused on winning Ohio and Florida, and appealing to moderate female swing voters eastern Pennsylvania and such. Imagine if, instead of one off the cuff remark about “Deplorables” Hillary spent the entire campaign attacking the Republican base, in order to instil the maximum amount of polarization and anger in the Democratic base.
Now we really are in “1860 election” territory.
not sure how this applies to my comment but I agree with all your points
I like the Electoral College and if we’re sticking with our current Constitutional system then we need it to stay sane. Now if we can find the political will to change our system that would be a different story.
“Election fraud! The vote is rigged!” And the Trump forces should know. They at it hard everywhere.
Yes, Repubs claiming “the election is rigged!” (given their ongoing, nationwide vote suppression strategy) is quite ironic. But irony is lost on them…
At it doesn’t even take into account that the election IS rigged–via Republican gerrymandering of the House! Ryan’s House majority is illegitimate.
Lesson in how to preserve the downticket with a vastly unpopular top-of-the-ticket.
Thanks for sharing!
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