1.2 million voters living (or dying) in North Carolina's 18 Hurricane Florence disaster counties — many of them African Americans — will find it nearly impossible to vote this fall. Homes are destroyed. Roads are ruined. Postal service is disrupted.
Before Florence struck, their ability to vote this year had already been efficiently suppressed by the state legislature’s GOP super-majority, which rammed into law an unfunded mandate requiring counties to increase Early Voting site hours. As good as such a law might sound at first, its intent and effect were both malicious: poorer counties (whose mostly African American voters are no friends of GOP pols) had to cut Early Voting site numbers in order to comply with the new site hours requirement without busting their meager budgets (in North Carolina, each county pays all of its own election administration costs out of its annual county budget).
Among the state’s current 18 disaster counties, 10 cut Early Voting site numbers this year (compared to 2014’s site numbers), by an average of 33%. In the most extreme case, Florence-ravaged Bladen County (with more than a quarter of its citizens living in poverty), cut back from 4 Early Voting sites in 2014 to just one site this year. Cutting voting site numbers puts the average voter's home much further from the nearest polling place, and that increased distance-to-poll disproportionately impacts working-poor voters’ ability to vote — many of whom lack transportation and all of whom lack the free time that enable more affluent voters to travel great distances and wait in long lines in order to cast a ballot.
And now, post-Florence, many of those working-poor voters live impossibly far from a polling place, facing insurmountable voter-suppressive barriers.
North Carolina’s state representatives must fix the mess they created, and help Hurricane Florence victims — of all colors and all parties — vote this fall. If you’re a North Carolinian, please call, write, or email your state representative and state senator, and demand an emergency session of the General Assembly to authorize and fund the North Carolina State Board of Elections to operate emergency mobile Early Voting centers in each of North Carolina’s 18 disaster counties for the fast-approaching Early Voting period (Oct. 17 — Nov. 3). You can find your legislators’ email addresses and phone numbers here: https://www2.ncleg.net/RnR/Representation