Guest Post by: James Simpson
In North Carolina Republicans took over the North Carolina legislature in 2010, and Charlotte ’s popular Republican mayor, Pat McCrory, won the governor’s mansion in 2012. This gave the GOP full control of the state government for the first time since 1898. In 2013 Governor McCrory signed a new voter ID law, and a fairly strong Republican majority, willing to take political risks, took over leadership of the State Board of Elections (SBOE). The Democrats are having fits.
An interesting email received this week offers a window into how Democrats used to rig the voter game.
A History of Voter Fraud
Vote fraud has been a long-standing tradition in Democrat-controlled North Carolina . For example, in 2012 the Democrat-controlled NC State Board of Elections (SBOE) openly, blatantly violated state election law by partnering with the Obama administration in offering illegal online voter registration. The corrupt administration of Democratic Governor Beverly Purdue—who declined to seek a second term rather than face a certain punishing defeat by McCrory in 2012—did nothing.
Participating in Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s “Crosscheck” program, North Carolina ’s new GOP-led SBOE matched 765 voters registered in both NC and another state with the exact name, DOB and last four digits of SSN of those who voted in both states in the 2012 election. They found a total of 35,750 matching with the exact name and DOB who voted in two states in 2012 (many states don’t provide SSN information). They also found 13,416 deceased voters on the voter rolls, some of whom have comeback from the dead to vote.
Some of this will certainly wind up to be clerical errors, but elections officials believe that partisans regularly use out-of-date voter registrations of people who have died or left the state in order to vote multiple times. In so doing they are committing both vote fraud and identity theft. This is a strong case for effective voter ID laws and cleaning the voter rolls—which are in shambles nationwide.
The Eric Holder Justice Department has pointedly resisted such efforts, battling states that enact voter ID laws—including North Carolina —and even suing states that attempt to clean their rolls. The reader can judge why. Opponents to cleaning up the rolls claim they are fighting “minority voter suppression,” but following enactment of voter ID laws in NC minority voter participation in 2014 primaries spiked 29.5 percent.
Students at the historically black Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) have been captive votes for city Democrats for ages. They have literally been ordered by faculty to register and vote in Elizabeth City , whether they live there or not. Some former students have even continued to vote by absentee ballot using the college address while residing and voting in other states. In April, 2013, the county board of elections sustained 57 of 60 voter registration challenges. All voters listed ECSU as their residence.
North Carolina’s Voter Integrity Project (VIP) discovered hundreds of individuals registered to vote who declined jury duty because they claimed non-citizen status. If their non-citizen status is accurate, they committed a crime by registering to vote. More than half of them voted one or more times. VIP has identified 147 cases of double voting by NC residents who moved to Florida and managed to vote in both locations. VIP has also identified over 20,000 voters registered with false addresses. Some counties even allow voters to register with non-existent addresses. The SBOE is now following up. The former Democrat-controlled SBOE couldn’t be bothered.
The NAACP is predictably suing Governor Pat McCrory, and has subpoenaed VIP, Civitas Institute and the John Locke Foundation for all their records and lists of supporters in what is obviously an effort to intimidate and destroy the organizations. VIP Director Jay DeLancy noted with irony, “During America’s civil rights era, several Governors and Attorney Generals attempted to destroy the NAACP by demanding their membership records and then punishing their supporters. The Supreme Court banned the practice in 1964’s NAACP v. Alabama decision,” he said, “but today, the NAACP are trying to use that tactic against us—private citizens who worry about election integrity.”
That Curious Email
So now back to that email. It appears innocent enough. Nothing more than an announcement of an upcoming county board of elections meeting. It is addressed to various local news media, a few local activists, and Democracy NC. The activists’ names and emails have been deleted out of respect for their privacy.
From: Sheila Holloman [mailto:sheila.holloman@bertie.nc.gov]
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2014 11:12 AM
To: bward@ncweeklies.com; Democracy NC; gene.motley@r-cnews.com; (twhite@ncweeklies.com); Wrcs-am;
Subject: Board Meeting Date
The Bertie County Board of Elections will meet on Tuesday, August 12th at 5pm at the Board of Elections Office at 210 W. Watson Street for a regular monthly meeting.
Sheila Holloman
Director
Bertie County Board of Elections
PO Box 312
Windsor, NC 27983
E-mail: bertie.boe@ncsbe.gov
Ph: 252.794.5306
Fax: 252.794.5368
Conspicuously absent from that email are any GOP organizations or individuals who might want to participate in the process. There is nothing stopping Republicans from attending, but for some reason they are not on the list. So while the GOP has taken over the government in Raleigh , locally, many election board meetings are still packed with Democrats and their media supporters. Local activists might want to fix that.
North Carolina’s Blueprint
Democracy NC is a large leftist activist organization that gets a lot of money from George Soros. The organization dominates state politics. Members attend every county board of elections meeting in the state, and in the past were able to browbeat election boards into accepting Democracy NC-selected locations for early voting. These were, of course, always in areas with democratic, usually minority, populations. As a result, Democrats have been able to take much more advantage of early voting and have shaped their campaigns around it.
Emails uncovered by NC Civitas, a think tank in Raleigh, found extensive coordination between Democracy NC’s Director, Bob Hall, Gary Bartlett, the (former) SBOE Chairman, and NC’s media establishment, who all work together in a coordinated effort to rig the elections and vilify political opposition in the press. Sound familiar?
Here are a few goals outlined in a leaked strategy memo of Blueprint North Carolina , a notorious leftist umbrella group of non-profits, activists and media organizations that includes Democracy NC and many others:
“Crippling their leaders ([Gov.] McCrory, [House Speaker] Tillis, [Senate President Pro Tem] Berger etc.).” (Tillis is now in a close race for the U.S. Senate with Democrat Kay Hagan. Ed.)
“Eviscerate the leadership and weaken their ability to govern.”
“Pressure McCrory at every public event.”
“Private investigators and investigative reporting, especially in the executive branch. …” “Organizers focus on year round voter registration. …”
Blueprint NC is simply North Carolina ’s application of the Democrats’ Blueprint, a nationwide strategy using the same smear tactics. It was originally developed in Colorado to turn the state blue using the vast funding of a few ultra-partisan leftist billionaires. Their example birthed Democracy Alliance, a secretive group of billionaires dedicated to pushing America into the socialist camp. Anyone who cares about America ’s future, but is unfamiliar with Blueprint or DA, is well advised to bone up.
North Carolina’s Constellation of Leftist Non-profits
NC Democrats are still vilifying, but HB 589, the Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA) voter ID law passed in 2013, really messed up their game. In addition to requiring photo voter ID, which will make all the forms of vote fraud described earlier much more difficult, the law abolished same-day registration and voting, reduced early voting from 17 to 10 days, and added some obscure but very meaningful provisions.
As a price for passing the legislation, Democrats demanded that while early voting days could be reduced to 10, the number of hours couldn’t. This meant, in many cases, more early voting locations had to be found. Unexpectedly, this put Democrats in a quandary. There are only so many potential voting sites in many districts, and in order to find new locations, local boards of elections have been forced to look outside their reliably Democratic voting areas. Republicans may finally be able to early vote in numbers.
Video
The accompanying video shows the Democrat-led SBOE discussing ways to handle 767 provisional votes that could not be verified as legitimate during the 2012 election. All the votes were cast outside of the county where the voter was legally required to vote. SBOE Director Gary Bartlett is on the right doing most of the talking. He offers many reasons voters might have done this. For example, they didn’t know any better, had moved within 30 days—which would make the vote legal—or they were lying. These votes were important, as one member describes, because there was a recount in process.
In one state senate race, candidates were separated by only 21 votes. One of the three Democratic members asks (there was only one Republican on the Board), “But at this point none of these ballots are counted?” Bartlett responds, “Yes they are.” Surprised, the member asks, “For the statewide race?” Bartlett answers, “For every race…” All of the votes were counted even though they were made outside of their legal districts because voting officials did not have sufficient time to check records. What is not stated is that Bartlett, who had been in the post for 20 years, set the deadlines for verifying provisional ballots. Bartlett is also among the NAACP’s list of plaintiff witnesses.
The video can be seen at the source site link
Numbering Provisional Ballots
Here’s another change that is making Democrats scream. The elimination of same-day voter registration and voting abolished a lot of fraud because verifying same-day registrations takes time, and often couldn’t or wouldn’t be completed before the certification date. Votes that couldn’t be verified still counted. But worse for vote fraudsters, the new law has reestablished the requirement to number provisional votes. Why does this matter?
Provisional ballots are supposed to be placed in separate envelopes to be verified following elections. According to Civitas Institute Policy Analyst Susan Myrick, a former Wake County elections official and one of the state’s foremost experts on voting law, what often happened in those minority districts that Democracy NC loves so much was that provisional ballots ended up in the regular voting box instead of in a safe place waiting to be researched and approved.
An innocent mistake, right? No problem. With a numbering system, all one had to do was find the provisional vote in the box, set it aside and verify it. Except that in recent years, Democrats removed the requirement to number provisional votes. That meant, if the vote went into a voting box instead of the envelope set aside for provisional votes, it got counted, period, and there was no way to verify its validity.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of many obscure little ways Democrats in North Carolina rigged elections in their favor. In safe Democrat districts, away from the prying eyes of poll watchers, phony provisional ballots easily found their way into the voting box to be counted as legitimate votes. Elections do matter, and North Carolina ’s dedicated activists and newly-installed political leaders deserve credit for seeking to restore integrity to the process under a tidal wave of hate-filled invective and frivolous lawsuits launched by a bunch of sore losers.