Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

BIG CITY: Vote like you mean it

Posted on October 27, 2011October 27, 2011 by Staff

Kirk Ross
Congratulations to all you Orange County residents who took advantage of the early-voting period and cast your ballots in the elections.

In the first three days of early voting, 773 people voted in one of four sites available. Broken down, the tallies show 215 voted at the Orange County Board of Elections office in Hillsborough, 148 at Carrboro Town Hall, 146 at University Square and a whopping 264 at the Seymour Center.

The downtown tallies for both Carrboro and Chapel Hill are a little low due to the timing of fall break. Now that students are back and the towns are up to full speed, the numbers at Town Hall and U-Square should pick up.

Early voting is an important innovation in helping more people show up to vote. It’s helpful in drawing in a broader representation of voters in the local races, and in the big election years like the one coming up, it aids in managing large turnouts, as it did in the last presidential cycle.

You may recall that in 2008, Orange County voters went to the polls early in record numbers. More than 55,000 voters cast their ballots early, compared to fewer than 20,000 who did so in the cold and snow on Election Day. The early vote was double that of the 2004 presidential contest and was a big part of the reason the county was able to record a healthy 77 percent turnout.

Orange County’s numbers were part of a record 2.6 million early voters statewide.

Combined with other steps the state has taken to make it easier to get registered and vote, early voting has been responsible for allowing more people to participate in our democracy.

You’d think that would be something we could all agree is a good thing. But when it comes to politics these days, we don’t agree about squat. And that’s why after years of trying to get more people to vote, there are troubling signs that people in a position to rewrite the state’s voting rules are changing course and trying to find ways to make getting registered and voting more difficult.

Vote suppression is not new, certainly not in North Carolina, where we are just a few scant decades from the time when intimidation was common currency and poll taxes and literacy tests were part of the political calculation.

This year, the legislature took a big step backward when, after a well-orchestrated campaign to inflate concern about voter fraud, it passed a Voter ID bill. Whether the measure really would stop anyone from committing fraud in the voting booth is dubious. What isn’t debatable is that the bill would make it harder for people in demographics that tend to lean Democratic to vote. Thankfully, the governor vetoed the bill and the legislature failed to override the veto.

But some of the people who gather in Raleigh and write laws from time to time are determined to continue to mess with elections. The adjournment resolutions passed at the end of the session in June and the two subsequent mini-sessions include language allowing legislators broad authority to write and pass election laws. There is even a mechanism that would allow the legislature to pass local Voter ID bills, which are not subject to a veto, on a county-by-county basis.

Taken with a heavily partisan and polarized redistricting process and other efforts to make voting and registration tougher, it’s clear that as long as the current leadership is in place in the General Assembly, they will find ways to game elections, not by getting more of their voters to the polls but by erecting barriers to voting that disproportionally affect the opposition.

I’m not sure what you call a system that relies on that tactic, but I’m pretty sure you can’t call it democracy.

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme