Four Eggers Ejected From ASU Early Voting Site

Four Eggers

Yesterday was chaotic in the Appalachian State University Early Voting site mandated by the State Board of Elections (SBOE) over the objections of Watauga County Board of Elections Chair Bill Aceto. One might think at least some of the chaos was the result of Aceto&Company's hostility, as students who wanted to register and vote -- still legal under North Carolina law -- got bad information and were often turned away. Later, those processes and the bad information was corrected, but at what cost already to young voters who were only trying to exercise their right to vote?

A video of the long lines in the ASU Student Union yesterday blew up almost instantly on the InnerTubes, and these images were captured before the line got really long. (You can see the video on the AppState Student Government Assn. Facebook page.)

Into this high-pressure setting -- that is, into the actual voting enclosure in the Blue Ridge Ballroom, where poll workers were trying to process the hundreds of students and where there were too few voting machines to handle the traffic -- strolled, late-morning, the most notorious Watauga County Republican political operative, one Four Eggers (Stacy C. Eggers IV), who sat himself down in the voting enclosure and proceeded to shuffle papers.

The man who as County Attorney and chief political officer for the Watauga County Republican Party installed his own puppet brother in 2013 as head of the local Board of Elections; the man who began to write new rules for the Board of Elections that punished then Elections Director Jane Anne Hodges and removed polling sites on the campus of ASU; the man who did everything in his power to put roadblocks up against student voting; the man who colluded behind the scenes with a Republican member of the SBOE to get his policies rubber-stamped, no questions asked; the man who made sure that a long-established Early Voting site in the ASU Student Union was removed in 2012; and the man whose actions and policies were ruled thuddingly unconstitutional by a Senior Superior Court Judge in 2014.

Yeah, Four Eggers, setting himself up in the voting enclosure, where he had no right to be. No earthly right whatsoever. No right as county attorney. No right as a private citizen. Certainly no right as a highly visible Republican political operative.

He was eventually run out of there when someone who did have a right to be in the voting enclosure threatened to call the SBOE and report his presence.

That was the atmosphere yesterday at the ASU Early Voting site. Where, nevertheless, voting far outstripped all other satellite Early Voting sites in the county.