From voter ID to gerrymandering, the political hacking of North Carolina

Like Russian efforts to hack U.S. elections, the North Carolina legislature’s attacks on our state’s democracy have been broad and brazen.

The Rev. William J. Barber II, taking his moral movement beyond N.C., reminded us last week on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” that our state’s racist election tampering was more of a threat than Russian operatives. The observation was sobering.

And his warning unheeded, at least by too many members of the General Assembly.

Just a few days later, the N.C. legislature pushed back against the executive and judicial branches to prop up its racially gerrymandered districts. Despite three pronouncements in as many weeks from the U.S. Supreme Court that North Carolina’s legislative and congressional districts were designed to pack and crack the political power of black voters, GOP lawmakers boldly batted efforts by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s call for a special session to redraw these discriminatory districts.

Senate leader Phil Berger responded to the notion of a special session with the audacious claim that the governor’s call to fix the unconstitutionally drawn districts was “unconstitutional.”

But the political hacking hasn’t stopped there. In fact, it seems to have just started.

The GOP supermajority, crafted from these unconstitutionally racist legislative districts, have spent months threatening to revive portions of a 2013 voter-suppression law that even the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider earlier this year.

N.C. GOP chairman Robin Hayes has doubled down on his commitment to voter suppression, championing President Donald Trump’s desires for lawmakers to “try again” with voter ID, a political-slogan-turned-weaponized tactic that has targeted African-Americans with “surgical precision,” and has proven to suppress votes.

Even former Gov. Pat McCrory – a political figure known to have challenged hundreds of innocent eligible voters, despite no chance of a political victory – re-emerged from obscurity during the annual N.C. Republican Party convention earlier this month in Wilmington to call for a reanimation of this suppressive legislation.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the Civitas Institute’s Conservative Leadership Conference Friday and Saturday in Raleigh will feature some of the country’s best-known architects of voter-suppression legislation. Like a bad case of déjà vu, Art Pope’s minions will likely cap off weeks of propaganda defending racist gerrymandering by providing a prelude to a parade of barriers that will face voters in the final days of this long legislative session.

But extremists in the General Assembly apparently feel that the hacking of our democracy need not end in the voting booth. Rather, they are looking to blunt our state’s last line of defense against their unconstitutional tactics: the executive and judicial branches.

High-profile figures like former Court of Appeals Judge Doug McCullough, who stepped down rather than letting legislative leaders steal his seat, say some Republican lawmakers are so motivated to hack the courts that they offered to give big raises to judges who didn’t oppose their judicial coup, and threatened funding to organizations who opposed it.

Six years into nonstop attacks on our democracy, I see many North Carolinians with a renewed sense of purpose and energy, pulling back the General Assembly’s curtain and pushing back against these craven takeovers. Through this work – from individual constituent calls to packed district meetings – the public has emerged as a fourth branch for meaningful checks and balances.

As Barber told The New York Times recently : “If we’re going to change the country … It’s not from D.C. down. It’s from the states up.” And, as the his Moral Movement has shown, change comes to states not from the legislatures down, but from the people up.

Our state’s ability to push back against this political hacking of our system will be defined by its people. North Carolinians fighting these bills were born decades ago, not yesterday.

This story was originally published June 14, 2017 at 6:00 PM with the headline "From voter ID to gerrymandering, the political hacking of North Carolina."