Democracy Five-Alarm Fire Of The Day: North Carolina Considering Removing 'Presumptive Noncitizen' Voters
Checking in on the latest in GOP attempted midterm election-stealery.
No one knows better than Republicans that if they can’t find a way to purge voter rolls of non-MAGA-inclined voters in swing states, November’s midterm elections will be the end of their control of the House of Representatives, and maybe even the Senate too. And that means President Donald John Trump’s agenda will be dead in the water, or at least stalled and forced to get more bold about breaking every law until the Supreme Court Six get charley horses in their necks from shrugging off the fascism.
Along with all of the gerrydoodling map fuckery going on, Pam Bondi’s DOJ has thirstily been trying to get a hold of states’ voter rolls to “do maintenance” on them, including trying to extort Minnesota into handing over their voter rolls in exchange for ICE leaving. (MN is not a swing state, but Trump, Bondi et al. are hoping they can make it one!) So far Bondi’s pestered 44 states for their voter data, and 11 (Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming) have said they will cooperate and turn over information, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers. And Bondi is suing in 24 other states that have declined her generous offer.
The situation is getting even stickier in the Tarheel State, where the Legislature has been slow-barbecuing Democracy by cravenly stripping any Democrats of any means of power since forever. But they put a real final char and a side of red slaw on it in November and December of ‘24, after Democrats won the positions of governor, loot-gov, secretary of state, and attorney general, and Republicans continued to hold onto both chambers of their Legislature, a divided trifecta. So in their defeat, they seized their chance to tighten the noose on the polecat, hastily passing a raft of measures to cut the powers of the executive triplex.
Now North Carolina’s state supreme court has just given a greenlight for the MAGA-controlled five-member North Carolina State Board of Elections to give the Republican auditor the full authority to appoint an elections board of his choice, upending a 125-year precedent of the governor doing that.
Said Board is considering a new ploy to trim state’s voter rolls of infidels. They’re now trying to implement a plan that would let them challenge any voter flagged in any database as a “presumptive noncitizen” and remove them, then put the onus on the voter to appear at a hearing with proof of citizenship to get their right to vote back. Wouldn’t it be so funny if some blue state tried to do that with guns, take them away based on somebody’s name being in a shadowy database of presumptive criminals then made the gun owner have to go argue in a hearing that they deserved the gun?
North Carolina’s jugheaded state supreme court would sure let them do it, too. The Elections Board, that is, NOT the guns, the guns are a HOLY RIGHT!!!
Remember the NC SC? The court that stalled for six months last year so every other lower court in the entire state could give serious consideration to letting election LOSER Judge Jefferson Griffin steal a seat on their very own bench? Eventually, his opponent, Judge Allison Riggs, did get seated, but Republicans still have a 5-2 majority.
Remember how in 2024 the North Carolina supreme court also made the state Board of Elections reprint ALL of the ballots to take Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off of them, long after Whale Juice missed the deadline to file to take his name off of the ballot? So, disgusted yet not surprised they’re doing what they can to pitch in for their fellow Good Old Boys.
PREVIOUSLY!
And the Board has already been working to snatch away campus voting sites, disgusting.
Said Jackson County Board of Elections Republican Chairman Bill Thompson about that:
“I would remind everyone when we talk about students, we’re not talking about kindergarteners who need help tying their shoes and opening their milk cartons. We’re talking about adults who are seeking their post-secondary education. These adults have demonstrated above-average ability and mobility.”
Indeed on average they do, but in the cases of more rural schools like Western Carolina University no campus voting means students who don’t have cars or can’t find a ride having to walk a mile or more along the thin shoulder of a sidewalk-less busy mountain highway. And NC has eliminated same-day registration, too, which is known to boost first-time voter participation.
But, their plans have complications! In North Carolina a plurality of voters, 38 percent, are registered independent. And in Georgia, where voters don’t register with a party and the primaries are open, every primary voter has three ballot choices: Democrat, Republican and Non-partisan.
And independents all over are unimpressed with the GOP agenda. Trump is already underwater five more points than Biden was a year into his term, and he’s negative 40 points with independents, with 67 percent disapproving.
So, time for more and increasingly pathetically desperate GOP “voter integrity” efforts like the ones they’ve been trying at since 2020: identifying voters they want to remove, like ones with addresses on college campuses, or foreign funny-sounding names. Or hey, why not people whose names don’t match their birth certificates, like anybody who’s changed their names after they got married, trans people, or boys whose dads named them Sue, how do you do?
Then Bondi will demand those states remove the voters on her shit list, and if a state doesn’t, they will cry fraud, rigging, Venezuelan space lasers when Republicans lose. And/or, recent citizens could be a source of names for ICE to find people whose visas may have been recently revoked. That is our Dionne Warwick prediction, anyway.
It’s a risky move! White and Hispanic men are the only demographic where Trump’s approval has declined by less, and the plan risks disenfranchising a lot of ardent male Trump supporters with Hispanic-sounding names, like, say, Nick Fuentes or Enrique Tarrio.
And even young white male Republican voters have become less enthusiastic with the GOP agenda. The incumbents are the establishment elite now, and they have done less than nothing on The Affordability. Many young America Firsters are also followers of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, and wondering why Trump got involved in Iran on behalf of Israel, why Trump is allowing any H-1B visa workers at all, and why presumptive 2028 candidate JD Vance spouts white supremacist lines yet keeps making half-Hindooo babies.
Nevertheless they persist. Example latest, the seizure of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, which our Evan wrote about yesterday and again today.
And all signs point to GOP election-stealing attempts getting way stupider and bolder before they get any smarterer. Now toothpaste and orange juice are together at last!
Them Duke boys are in trouble, General Lee horn noise!
Will they manage to steal the midterms?
Stay tuned!
My, what a lively romp our dying democracy is having.
[Brennan Center / Democracy Docket / New York Magazine archive link]
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A Fed agency and certainly the DOJ should not have anything to do with a State's voter rolls!
OT: Meanwhile, back in Reality, I must look peckish, as Carlos, our chonk kitty, has just brought me a nourishing catnip mouse.