North Carolina election officials don’t like the method Americans for Prosperity is using to solicit voters to request absentee ballots. The group has sent hundreds of thousands of mailers to registered voters with instructions for requesting a ballot by mail, but the request form is pre-addressed to AFP’s office in Raleigh rather than to the [...]
For anyone thinking the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is no longer needed, consider the crucial role it has played in beating back measures to make voting harder in several states covered by VRA’s Section 5 pre-clearance provision. Without such protection, a federal judge might listen to evidence of the clear discriminatory impact of a [...]
Labor Day brings a special report from the NC Justice Center entitled The State of Working North Carolina, 2012. The executive summary explains: “North Carolina working families lost financial ground and experienced diminished opportunities through the decade of the 2000s due to several economic trends, including a dramatic increase in income inequality and the decline of [...]
You may not think of the United Steel Workers Union as a likely place to learn about the dangers of voter suppression measures around the nation, but they’ve gotten involved big time in the past couple of years. Their special website has a load of information, including the latest news stories from around the country, [...]
The Truth and Hope Poverty Tour visited all parts of North Carolina and helped bring attention to the impact of poverty on people’s daily lives. You can take part of the tour with this new video from Cash Michaels, the first cut of a documentary about a world that is present yet unseen.
A Raleigh-based group called Voter Integrity Project is forcing election officials to spend hundreds of hours researching the status of voters the group claims are not alive or not citizens. VIP’s first mass action challenged the registrations of over 500 voters whose names matched people who indicated they were not citizens in their response to [...]
Early Voting is very popular in North Carolina and the evidence shows it doesn’t inherently favor Democrats or Republicans (see reports here and here). But in the current hyper-partisan environment, disputes over the location and hours of Early Voting sites are too often turning into a power struggle instead of a rational discussion about sensible [...]
A report released today reveals that North Carolina has 115,000 registered Latino voters or nearly 25,000 more than the official count at the State Board of Elections (which only began asking voters their ethnicity in 2002). That's a 35% increase over the number in October 2008. In addition, the report says another 100,000 unregistered Latino [...]
Here are two NC stories of groups setting out to exert power – one taking the hard road of community organizing and grassroots democracy, the other using their big-money connections to buy an election. The first story describes how and why Stokes County neighbors came together to wage an impressive campaign against the prospect of [...]
Only 3.6% of registered North Carolina voters cast ballots in the runoff election on July 17. That's about one-tenth of the already miserable turnout rate for the May primary - 34.7%. FairVote's analysis of the runoff notes that more North Carolinians believe in fairies and vampires than voted in July. The losers in the primary received far more votes [...]