Facing South this week includes a report from the Sentencing Project about the number of citizens in each state who are disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. North Carolina bars people who are serving a felony sentence from voting, but they automatically regain their voting rights as soon as they finish their sentence, including probation [...]
Check out this video of slam master Bluz of Charlotte rapping on more than you hear at first listen; it begins 1 minute into the video, after Robert Dawkin’s introduction. Thanks to the Democracy Summer team in Charlotte for hosting the “Shade of Democracy” event – a “fusion of art and activism.”
One of the few positives that came with the adjournment of the General Assembly earlier this week was a negative: After months of trying, the Republican leadership had to admit it could not find enough votes to override Gov. Perdue’s veto of the harsh photo ID bill, H-351. (For background about the photo ID fight [...]
Click here to read part one. After an exhausting week of interviews, I found myself rising early Saturday morning to volunteer at the "Juneteenth" festival in Durham. Excited to have an opportunity to "Get Out the Vote," I set up my table four full hours before the festival started, hoping to catch people who were [...]
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 [...]
Hello all! My name is Erin Sweeney and I am a student intern doing a summer research project for Democracy North Carolina. I’m working out of Democracy NC’s headquarters in Durham. It may surprise some of you that Democracy NC does not have a fulltime organizer for the Triangle; the main office serves more as [...]
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 [...]