O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Return of "Four" Eggers

Photo by Lonnie Webster

Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four"), who was outed by the Winston-Salem Journal in September of 2013 as the puppet-master behind the Republican-dominated Watauga County Board of Elections (BOE) -- and the author of its policies and procedures and of the correspondence that went to the State Board of Elections under his brother Luke's name -- made a sudden appearance at the special meeting of the Watauga BOE Thursday evening.

Brother Luke Eggers, who is the putative chair of the BOE, said his brother was there in his official capacity as Watauga County Attorney. Everyone in the audience thought he was there to make sure that Republicans win the municipal elections of 2015 and the general elections of 2016, by whatever means necessary.

Four Eggers is also on the Executive Committee of the Watauga County Republican Party, and it's clear that he's had a heavy hand in the picking of a former chair of the Watauga GOP as the new Elections Director to replace the retiring Jane Ann Hodges.

It was Four Eggers who made it his project to force the fair and impartial Jane Ann Hodges into retirement. That particular project included the rewriting of Director Hodges' job description in August of 2013, which included new harassment: she was not to receive visitors or phone calls that were not logged; she was not to be alone in the office without other staff people; she was not to offer her opinion -- an opinion based on 29 years of non-partisan election experience -- at BOE meetings, unless directly asked by the newly appointed young men who had zero election experience.

Jane Ann Hodges has said that she is retiring for the sake of her health. The strain has become too great. And she's said about leaving a job she loves and does well.

Four Eggers engineered the end of Jane Ann Hodges' career, and he used his younger brother as a willing pawn. Four was there Thursday night to make sure nothing went wrong with the installation of a political hack to replace Jane Ann Hodges.

It is the last piece of the puzzle that Four Eggers has been assembling since Pat McCrory moved into the governor's mansion in Raleigh and every Board of Election in the state changed hands. It was Four who proposed the "mega-precinct" in Boone that would have combined three Boone precincts into one, containing most of the students at Appalachian State University (that scheme got shot down in Raleigh). It was Four who decreed that there would no longer be Early Voting on the ASU campus (that scheme was shot down by a Superior Court Judge in Wake County). It was Four who decided that the largest urban precinct in Boone -- New River III -- should be moved way out to the farthest corner of the precinct, miles from town, to a polling place not serviced by Appal Cart.

Now Four will get his highly partisan Elections Director, and no one with any sense or a scintilla of awareness of what's been going on will ever trust another election outcome in Watauga County again.

Ask Yourself This
If the shoe were on another hoof altogether -- if a Democratic governor were in the brick mansion in Raleigh and if a Democratic majority on the Watauga BOE had the power and appointed as Elections Director a former chair of their party, not to mention a highly partisan political operative -- Republicans would just sit back and say, "Oh, well, guess we have to accept what they do, because that's just the way it is"?

If you don't want political nuclear winter, don't keep spilling radioactive acid.