More is coming out about the shady activities of Nathan Sproul, a long-time Republican operative and the man behind Strategic Allied Consulting. Authorities in Florida yesterday began a criminal investigation into SAC’s activities after election officials in several counties found suspicious voter registration forms submitted by SAC employees. In many cases, the voter’s party affiliation [...]
Greg Flynn, ace investigator and blogger, uncovered the North Carolina ties of a well-connected voter registration outfit caught cheating in Florida. His work adds considerably depth to the unfolding story of Nathan Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting firm which, until last month, held multi-million-dollar contracts to conduct voter registrations drives for the Republican National Committee and state [...]
Voters in Wake County and elsewhere are getting letters saying they’re suspected of being dead, thanks to North Carolina’s version of True the Vote, the Tea Party-inspired voter purging outfit. WRAL has a chilling account, with links to earlier stories, about this latest chapter in the sometimes useful but mostly destructive work of the NC Voter Integrity [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
Despite campaign promises to stamp out “pay to play” politics in Raleigh, House Speaker Thom Tillis is in the middle of what can only be called a shakedown of lobbyists for campaign cash. His political director sent an email to many lobbyists with a clear message: get your PAC to send us a check by [...]
The NC General Assembly created a new commission to develop the rules for how hydraulic drilling of natural gas (fracking) can proceed in North Carolina and it gave most the seats to the mining and energy industry. That’s bad enough, but it turns out Speaker Thom Tillis filled a seat reserved for an environmentalist with [...]
Students at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication have created an interactive flow chart of the money in NC political campaigns with annotated descriptions of key terms. Visualize rivers of money. They’ve also just posted a series of articles about NC campaign finances on their WhichWayNC website and blog. Did you know that [...]
A federal grand jury has indicted state legislator Rep. Stephen LaRoque (R-Kinston) on a variety of charges related to misusing federal funds received by two nonprofit lending outfits he created "to alleviate poverty and increase economic activity and employment in rural communities." The charges follow an investigative series by NC Policy Watch and include stealing $300,000 from the federal government, failing [...]