Voter Suppression in Forsyth County Also Backfires

The Forsyth County Board of Elections reduced Early Voting locations in downtown Winston-Salem to one, eliminating a site on the Winston-Salem State University campus. It's been the pattern all across North Carolina, including in Watauga County: squeeze the urban locations for Early Voting in an attempt to discourage urban voters.

But on Saturday, the last day of Early Voting, hundreds of people jammed the downtown Winston-Salem site, determined to "vote with a vengeance" against the blatant voter suppression that was going on. The last people in line on Saturday voted at 4 p.m.

Making long lines is just another tactic, and how have the Republicans accomplished that? One way was to eliminate straight-ticket voting, so that every voter has to mark potentially dozens of bubbles, which takes a long time. Someone tweeted on Saturday: "Hope the people made to wait long hours to vote are thinking of the politicians who created this situation!"

Make Early Voting inconvenient, slow up the lines, jam up the voters for hours -- maybe they'll just get discouraged and go away.

But, no, in Forsyth County, people were VOTING WITH A VENGEANCE and did not get discouraged. Chad Nance described the mood in line as "cheerful" and the line itself as "historic."