In a fit of pique, 18 of the state’s 100 Republican-controlled county boards of elections noted that “at least one” can also mean “only one.” And so they devised 2016 EV plans that called for the shuttering of all but one EV site during the first seven days of early voting.
The poster child for this effort was Guilford County, which cut its Week 1 site numbers from 16 in 2012 to just 1 in 2016 – a whopping 94% cut. The result, which was entirely predictable, is illustrated in the graph above, which is a county-by-county breakdown of the number of ballots cast thus far in the first days of early voting, from October 20th through 24th (expressed as a percentage of the ballots cast during the corresponding period in 2012). Guilford County has earned the dubious distinction of being the state’s most successful voting super-suppressor, posting just 3% of the number of ballots its voters cast during the same interval in 2012.Also joining this select club of super-suppressors are Alamance (10% of 2012’s ballots cast in 2016), Brunswick (25%), Craven (15%), Forsyth (6%), Gaston (22%), Henderson (19%), Jackson (19%), Johnston (11%), Mecklenburg (22%), Nash (20%), Northampton (19%), Onslow (13%), Polk (34%), Robeson (11%), Rowan (13%), Sampson (16%) and Wayne (15%) counties. Meanwhile, voting action in the state’s 82 other counties is averaging 124% of 2012’s performance.
The members of the North Carolina’s Super Suppressors Club have done what Gov. McCrory, the North Carolina GOP and the General Assembly could not: in effect, they cut the Early Voting period in their counties from 17 days down to just 9, by starving their voters for the first week of Early Voting. And it’s all perfectly legal (albeit obviously immoral).