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."

The Voter Reg. Group Blocked From High Point Univ. Was a Conservative Org.

Meet Leigh Thomas, the chair of the High Point University Young Republicans, who since yesterday has become the poster child for voter suppression. She was videotaped laying down the law to campus security that she did not -- positively did not -- want any voter registration happening on her campus:

“I understand the registration process. I’m just not sure if this is something I would want to have on this High Point University campus, the registration of voting."

The video made the rounds yesterday morning on social media before it was made "private," but it soon reemerged and has become ever more famous.

Chad Nance at Camel City Dispatch has done due diligence in tracking down the agencies and personalities revealed here, and it's fairly amazing to discover that the independent voter registration effort at High Point University was being conducted by Turning Point USA, a conservative group promoting Republican policies.

Nance extrapolates the reasoning non-thinking process employed by Young Republican Leigh Thomas, who apparently has the power at High Point University to order campus security to do things to her liking:

So what is behind this ding-bat decision? Has Thomas gotten a crazy notion that “Only liberals like registering voters” somewhere in the un-plumbed depths of this young lady’s mind? Is the state party apparatus so terrified of the mythological youth vote that they have ordered college Republican groups to do whatever is in their power to make sure that no new voters are minted on university grounds? Has Thomas been so conditioned by repetitive exposure to propaganda geared toward convincing Republicans that the entire elections system is rife with fraud, registering voters might be a little gay, and a small group of elites with a right to vote based on economic status might be a pretty good idea down the line?

Is this spill-over from the very real efforts by the North Carolina GOP establishment to clamp down on and marginalize truly grassroots activists and candidates? ...

Young Republicans take orders from up the food-chain, and they've been told that registering their age group is just bad for maintaining Republican power.

We don't know from nothing about High Point University, but Chad Nance seems authoritative in his characterization of that campus:

HPU is the school where rich people send their dumb kids who can’t cut it at elite schools. They’ve spent millions of dollars transforming themselves into a Walt Disney version of a university where the one-percenters can install their kids, apparently safe in the knowledge that some of them won’t let crazy notions about democracy and doubting the growing American oligarchy get into their pretty, little heads.

Well, okay then. Perhaps that explains one of the more bizarre moments in the 2014 election cycle in North Carolina, where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great.