Watch for Voter Harassment Based on Delusion

 

Long before Trump made fraud the only conceivable reason he could ever lose, GOP leaders often invoked busloads of undocumented brown people voting in North Carolina to explain their losses. No need to also explain their wins, because every honest voter loves them, right? Now fraud is the watchword  of many politicians, following Trump's lead to the point that roughly 70% of registered Republicans "believe there is widespread voter fraud."

Hell, they claim fraud even in counties that went 70% for Trump, and some very right-wing Republican members of the General Assembly wanted to force their way into the Durham County elections office to inspect voting equipment -- because, well, it's the most Democratic county in the state, so too many Black votes, obviously.

It's going to get worse.

Jim Womack

Just finished reading an investigative piece of journalism about the "North Carolina Election Integrity Team" (NCEIT), a kind of Republican voting gestapo of "observers" who have based all their hoped-for observations on the fantasy of widespread fraud. You think it's there, you'll find it, Betty, and you've been trained to kick up a ruckus. As far as NC polling enclosures go, seeing things that aren't there because you've been primed to see them amounts to harassment based on a delusion.

The leader of the election integrity team (NCEIT) is one Jim Womack, the GOP chair of Lee County and a follower of Cleta Mitchell, notorious as the Trump lawyer who sat in on the call to Georgia that demanded the SecState "find" a few more thousand votes. Mitchell now lives in NC and is happy to pitch in on the project of delegitimizing democracy altogether.

Deep in the Laura Lee and Jordan Wilkie investigation of NCEIT and Womack, I encountered this paragraph:

Womack said that he and his group are now gearing up for the next election by creating a “suspicious voters list” of anyone they believe to be double-registered or not actually a citizen, and asking members in every county to use it to challenge voters on sight.

Jesus! If you look Hispanic, you a target, Bro, and gawd knows what other visible attributes will attract the gaze of a Womack "observer."

You don't have to put up with harassment in the polling place. Assert yourself.

NOTE: The piece of journalism being referenced here was published online in The Assembly, which is behind a very modest paywall, which I gladly pay because it's an excellent source of independent journalism that's North Carolina specific. It offers what good big-city dailies used to offer, and we've got to support such reporting for the sake of the Republic.