In the weeks before North Carolina’s primary, two things happened that many voters never heard about, and together, they tell you everything you need to know about the state of voting rights in this state.
First, just weeks before the primary election, the State Board of Elections (SBE) sent approximately 241,000 letters to registered voters, a list overrepresented by Black and brown voters, suggesting that their registrations may be invalid and causing concerns among voters that they could be turned away at the polls. Next, we were faced with the elimination of Sunday voting in multiple counties and the closure of Early Voting sites on multiple college campuses– including the nation’s largest HBCU.
Taken separately, each of these situations can be explained away as “administrative error” or “logistics changes.” However, when you look at these things together and view them against the arc of North Carolina’s past and recent electoral history, they reveal what organizations like Forward Justice see as deliberate, strategic, and familiar patterns of making it harder for Black voters to participate in our democracy.…
