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We interrupt our county-by-county coverage of NC's contending Early Voting plans for a brief explainer regarding why you should care about this arcane inside-baseball topic.
By law, NC's process for planning its Early Voting is a hyper-partisan crazy-quilt.... #ncpol
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Each of the state's 100 counties has its own semi-independent County Board of Elections (CBOE), comprising 2 Democratic and 2 Republican political appointees. These boards' single most important responsibility is to plan their counties' early voting for each election.
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A co's "Early Voting Plan" specifies: (1) how many voting sites; (2) where they're located; and (3) their open days & hrs. Plenty of oppty here to bake in #VoterSuppression by keeping polls out of disfavored neighborhoods, or closed during convenient voting hrs & days.
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So, every 2 years, each CBOE's Rep & Dem appointees fight like weasels & lions to adopt the plan they favor - except when, too often, Dems appoint weak go-along-get-along board members as a sinecure for party good ol' boys.
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Adopting a county plan requires the unanimous vote of all the board's Dems + Reps. When that fails, the opposing sides submit their own plans to the State Bd of Elections, which chooses one plan (often w/ modifications) in its own hyper-partisan process in early August.
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This year there were 15 non-unanimous counties in NC. Their opposing plans can be found here: dl.ncsbe.gov/index.html?pre… (Dare Co's submission is still in process). These are the plans we're analyzing in our ongoing tweet-storm.
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The State Bd (@NCSBE) meets on Sun, Aug 5 3 PM to decide on these 15 contested county EV plans. We'll be there (WFU Law School auditorium in Winston-Salem) live-blogging w/ our patented sarcastic bite, at insight-us.org/blog/. It'll be a zoo. Join us online or live!
9/9 Final note: if you attend the @NCSBE meeting in person on Aug 5, please be respectful & quiet. This is a quasi-judicial body and the board can & will clear the gallery if attendees get out of hand. Don't do that, b/c sunshine is the best disinfectant.
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As we prepare to load the 2018 county Early Voting plans' data into our Early Voting Evaluator (insight-us.org/eve_1/eve.html), we'll post some quick takes here re: the 15 contested plans to be decided by the State Board of Elections. First up, Durham's competing plans: #ncpol
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Unlike the cash-strapped counties that have to cut their Early Voting sites (see the graph) to pay for @NCGOP legislators' unfunded mandate that increases the cost of operating Early Voting sites, affluent Durham looks set to substantially increase its site numbers.
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Durham's majority plan (1 D and 1 R) would bump Early Voting sites from 2014's 4 to 6 this Nov., & the minority plan (by 1 R) would up it even further, to 7 sites. Both include sites at Duke & NCCU (missing in 2014). Both plans offer > 4x the total site-hours of 2014.