Reduction in Early Voting Was Never About Voter Fraud -- Another High-Level Republican Memo Surfaces Today

The News and Observer finally got hold of yet another email sent to Republican boards of elections members across the state -- Aceto, Owen ... you sly foxes! in whose mouths butter won't melt -- telling them that they are expected to act in "the best interests of the party." Oh, sure, the "CONFIDENTIAL" memo states, the GOP will follow the law, and luckily, according to the law as Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") and other pooh-bahs in the NC GOP want to interpret it, Republican boards of elections are not required to hold early voting anywhere else but in the BOE office.

Who sent this second bomb-shell memo? NCGOP 1st Congressional District Chairman Garry Terry, who argued that any early voting hours and sites beyond the legal minimum would give Democrats an advantage in November.

“We will never discourage anyone from voting but none of us have any obligation in any shape, form or fashion to do anything to help the Democrats win this election,” Terry wrote. “Left unchecked, they would have early voting sites at every large gathering place for Democrats.”

There we go again with that dominant 2016 Republican voting meme: If Democrats are voting, there must be something morally, ethically, and spiritually wrong.

Terry’s memo suggests two options for county board of elections members: They should make the “financially prudent decision” to schedule a single early voting site during weekday business hours, or “do nothing and do not meet at all” before the state deadline for filing early voting schedules. That way, he suggested, the state would automatically set the minimum hours. Mr. Four Eggers must have gotten that memo, forwarded, we assume, from Bill Aceto.

Because Bill Aceto did not even want to hold the meeting that he finally held, and then he was quick -- too quick -- to adjourn, announcing "we have no vote, we have no plan."

Straight out of Mr. Terry's cheat-sheet.

The showdown happens tomorrow in Raleigh at the State Board of Elections meeting. It'll be a marathon, and I'll be live-tweeting @JerryWilliamso1.