Omission accomplished
by Tom Sullivan
Since elections that gave the GOP control of North Carolina's legislature (2010) and governor's mansion (2012), creating jobs hasn't exactly been Job One. But keeping theirs has. That has meant election changes from soup to nuts, or rather, from gerrymandering to photo identity cards. The cherry on top? Voter registrations state agencies must offer clients by the National Voter Registration Act dropping by 50 percent since Gov. Pat McCrory took office. Plus regular voter fraud snipe hunts designed to generate public support for even more election "reforms."
For all their amateur data-sleuthing, what the state's voter fraud vigilantes lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. Yet documenting non-anecdotal cases of fraud has proven difficult. Finding real victims of the voting restrictions they advocate, less so, as the Institute for Southern Studies found:
Jerome Roberts and his daughter Diana battled nearly unbelievable odds to become U.S. citizens. And one of the first things they wanted to do after becoming naturalized was to cast votes in North Carolina's 2014 elections.
In the 1990s, they had fled their native Liberia during the West African country's deadly civil wars, which claimed the lives of both of Jerome's parents. After living in a U.N. refugee camp in Ghana for several years, the family was moved in 2000 by the U.S. government to a resettlement in Charlotte, where Jerome has worked as a service technician for the city for eight years.
They were excited about voting as full citizens in their first general election in November 2014. And then?
On the morning of the elections, Jerome picked Diana up from high school, where she was an 18-year-old in her last semester, and they headed to their precinct at Druid Hills Academy. When they arrived, however, they discovered that Diana — despite being a naturalized citizen, and a registered voter since September — had been flagged as a potential non-citizen by state election officials. According to state law, only naturalized citizens can vote.
Diana was apparently on a list of 1,454 names the N.C. State Board of Elections gave to local election officials shortly before the 2014 elections, identifying registered voters whose "citizenship status was in question." More than 300 names had been sent to Mecklenburg County.
According to Jerome and Diana, their voting experience went downhill from there. A poll worker told them to wait while precinct officials "called downtown" to address Diana's citizenship status. They waited more than two hours, to no avail. In the meantime, Jerome — unfamiliar with the voting process — asked the same poll worker for help understanding his ballot; according to Jerome, she became impatient and dismissive, saying, "We can't help you."
In the end, Jerome cast a ballot, but Diana, frustrated and tired, did not. Asked if she planned to try again next election, she said no. Jerome added, "Is this how people vote in this country? Because these are the things that make people not want to vote."
As President George W. Bush once said of his administration's custom-designed fiasco, "Mission accomplished."