The NC General Assembly adjourned today and the impact of its final decisions will reverberate for years to come – from a conniving vote that legalizes fracking and energy exploration, to the disgraceful deal-making that sold out students, the Racial Justice Act and victims of sterilization, to a last-minute change in the final state budget that [...]
Daily Kos has this update on what it calls the “War on Voting,” including a roundup of news from various states and video clips of Republican leaders using the issue for partisan gain. In one, the Majority Leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Mike Turzai) boasts about his achievements for the year and declares, [...]
Editorial writers in Asheville, Wilmington, Raleigh, and other cities are rightly blasting the General Assembly’s leadership for eliminating $660,000 in the state funding that would have released $4.1 million in federal money for voting machines, poll workers, and Early Voting centers. Why give up a $7 return on a $1 investment? Word on the inside [...]
The NC Free Enterprise Foundation, a pro-business nonprofit that tracks political developments in the state, has produced two insightful documents that profile the most competitive contests for the NC House and NC Senate. The two reports also rank all the seats in each chamber for partisan competitiveness, revealing the overall tilt toward Republicans as a [...]
From a release by Democracy North Carolina today: “Something very strange happened in the final version of the State Budget that House and Senate leaders rolled out yesterday. It eliminates provisions in earlier versions passed by the House and Senate to provide about $600,000 that would automatically release over $4 million in federal funds for improving [...]
Want to know what kind of havoc an anti-voter governor can inflict on citizens he doesn’t like? You can get a taste from the initiatives of Gov. Rick Scott in Florida, including ridiculous rules for registering new voters that drove away the League of Women Voters and mean-spirited ethnic cleansing of voters already on the [...]
Follow-up on HAVA funds: The NC General Assembly continues to hear about the importance of including roughly $650,000 in the state budget in order to free up $4.1 million in federal money for operating our elections system. The federal money from the Help America Vote Act will pay for voting machine maintenance, poll worker training, Early [...]
There’s lots in the daily news of the doings and undoings in the General Assembly and elsewhere, but you may have missed coverage about this new electioneering operation sponsored by the Ayn Rand-wing of the North Carolina business establishment. The mainstream press hasn't noticed yet. Public-interest investigator Greg Flynn reports that these White-Men-With-Too-Much-Money have hired [...]
The Institute for Southern Studies/Facing South reveals the connection between toxic money pouring into NC politics and legislation to increase toxic chemicals pouring into our air. The article draws on a new analysis by Democracy North Carolina of the political muscle of 27 leading polluters and their trade groups. Hint: by themselves, they annually spend [...]
The video purporting to document two non-citizens and a dead man receiving ballots during the NC primary turns out to be an even bigger hoax than we first reported. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas carefully edited out a section of the filming where the voter impersonating a dead person actually requests the ballot in the name [...]