Is Watauga BOE Member Eric Eller Just Nathan Miller with Hair?

Nathan Miller

Nathan Miller is the attorney currently leading the Watauga GOP from his first vice chair position. He was teamed with the infamous attorney Four Eggers through all the battles (2013-2017) over the voting rights of AppState students. Solo, Miller has successively sued three different Democratic members of the Watauga County Board of Elections. He sued Democrat Kathleen Campbell twice, once for her emails, a fishing expedition that produced nothing, and then he sued Kathleen Campbell to make her pay his lawyer fees for suing her.

He sued BOE member Stella Anderson, or rather he sued AppState University for her emails, another fishing expedition that produced nothing.

Now he's sued the latest Democratic member of the Board of Elections, Jane Anne Hodges, alleging she prejudiciously kept a Republican from working as a precinct judge.

Every Democrat who gets appointed to the Watauga Board of Elections can expect frivolous harassment by Nathan Miller.

That's only part of his war on voting. He sued in October 2017 to override the Wake Superior Court order for an early voting site at ASU, and losing that attempt but managing to delay the public notice period, he then sued to overturn the Boone Town Council elections and hold new elections because advertisement of early voting sites violated the statute. Miller's legal skip-rope did manage to delay the swearing in of new council members, but it also helped cement Miller's reputation as a joke in Raleigh legal circles.


Now ... Eric Eller, another Republican attorney who was appointed to the Watauga board early this year to replace Bill Aceto, wants to prosecute ASU students who voted provisional ballots when in fact they weren't registered to vote. Last Thursday and Friday, at the BOE's official disposition of provisional ballots, Eller complained about the almost 200 students who thought they were registered, who asked for provisional ballots, but whose ballots didn't count. Were they trying to commit election fraud? Eller actually suggested that those students might well be referred to the district attorney for prosecution.

Those students. They thought they were registered because they had filled out registration forms back in August, or September, or prior to the close of registration on October 12, but they had failed to include some required information -- last four digits of their SSN, a street address of residence -- or failed to check a box. Because they didn't include a phone number (which is optional), no one could reach them to get the missing information. So their voter registrations got tossed and their provisional ballots could not count. That's what happened to almost 200 would-be student voters.

We realize the Republicans have no desire to see certain people vote, or certain other people administer election law, but the willingness to use the legal system as a political brick-bat to retaliate against the other side ... is just so ... authoritarian.

Eric Eller, center

Change Gonna Come
On December 4, the present makeup of both the State Board of Elections and every county board of elections becomes legally null and void by order of a three-judge panel -- which had ruled even before the election that the Republican reorganization of all boards of elections was unconstitutional. The court ordered that the State Board must return to a 3-2 Democratic/Republican makeup, and each county board must return to a 2-1 Democratic/Republican makeup.

Naturally, the Berger-Moore forces in the NC General Assembly, in their rump special session which will convene next week, will come up with some new innovation before they lose their veto-proof majority. You can bet on it.

Nathan Miller Suit Against Kathleen Campbell Dismissed

Just in: the judge has dismissed Nathan Miller's lawsuit against Kathleen Campbell.

Another Chapter in the Corruption of the Watauga Board of Elections

An agenda item on this evening's meeting of the Watauga County Commission was a recommendation that Matt Snyder be allowed to start paid work as the new executive director of the Watauga County Board of Elections two weeks in advance of his actual appointment.

To recap, Matt Snyder is the former Republican Party Chair who got the job of running Watauga elections without a competitive job search or even an open call for applications.

It came out that Mr. Snyder is being paid $48,000 per annum for the job.

After the commissioners voted to begin paying Snyder in advance of his actual appointment (a motion that John Welch and Billy Kennedy voted "no" on), in the public comment period at the end of the meeting, we also learned this:

1. The $48,000 salary figure had been a "place-holder" in the annual county budget projections, a place-holder which became fact after that budget was voted on by the Commission.

2. Mr. Snyder had actually demanded a salary of $55,000, but he sent that request not to the Board of Elections which hired him but to the County Commission, which did not hire him.

3. It is required by law that the Board of Elections consider and decide Mr. Snyder's salary, not the County Commission. The BOE is then supposed to make a recommendation to the Commissioners. None of that happened.

4. What happened is that Mr. Luke Eggers, chair of the Board of Elections, simply set Mr. Snyder's salary unilaterally, bypassing his own Board, and further requested the two-week "running start" to that salary, also bypassing his own Board.

5. People speaking about this during the Public Comment section of tonight's agenda, including Kathleen Campbell, the Democratic member of the Board of Elections, who testified that no Board meeting was ever held to consider Mr. Snyder's salary, were essentially addressing their objections to the legality of those proceedings to Mr. Austin Eggers, sitting in as County Attorney. Austin Eggers is close kinfolk of Mr. Luke Eggers.

6. The Eggers Eggers Eggers & Eggers law firm seems to have cornered operational conflicts of interest in pretty much the Western World.

Miller v. Campbell Comes To a Head

There's an old saying -- "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client." I believe I witnessed the truth of that at a hearing in Watauga civil court this morning when former Watauga County Commission Chair (and practicing attorney) Nathan Miller represented himself in defending a motion by Kathleen Campbell for summary dismissal of the suit that Miller brought against her last year for the production of public records.

Miller admitted to the judge this morning that he had in fact received everything he had sought from Kathleen Campbell, the Democratic member of the Watauga County Board of Elections. At issue for him now is that he wants Kathleen Campbell to pay personally his lawyer fees for suing her. I'm not making that up. That is exactly what he wants: he wants Kathleen Campbell to pay him for the time he spent in harassing her because of her political affiliation and her defense of voting rights for everyone.

The lawyers for Kathleen Campbell argued for the dismissal of Miller's original lawsuit on the grounds that Miller had not sued the right person -- the "custodian" of the public records -- who was Director of the Watauga Board of Elections, Jane Ann Hodges. Plus, they argued, because Miller's lawsuit was essentially "frivolous" and in the nature of political payback, they're planning to make their own case for the recovery of attorney's fees from Miller.

Miller replied that if his lawsuit was frivolous, then why did Kathleen Campbell produce the email records he was seeking? The judge, who is from Stokes County and totally unfamiliar with Watauga politics, suggested an answer to that question from the bench: "Perhaps, Mr. Miller, because you know where she lives."

Whoa. The judge was evidently reading Miller quite correctly, seeing the bully beneath the sharkskin suit.

When Miller rambled off into a disjointed narrative about the contentiousness of recent Board of Elections meetings and decisions, the judge listened patiently for a while and then asked pointedly, "What are you talking about?" I believe the Stokes County judge was beginning to get a pretty good glimpse into the politics of Watauga County and did not particularly want to go there.

Miller at one point appeared to be arguing the other side altogether. He admitted to the judge that there is absolutely no precedent whatsoever in North Carolina for a lawyer representing himself getting attorney's fees for that representation. He even produced a U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled against such a fee award.

The judge from Stokes will rule later this week on the motion for summary dismissal of Miller's lawsuit against Campbell and presumably on Miller's motion that Campbell should pay him for the privilege of being sued.

And I believe we have a new benchmark for hubris in the political history of Watauga.

Watauga Board of Elections: Give-a-Man-Enough-Rope Edition

Transparent men

Well, it is April Fool's Day after all.

Sure enough, this evening the Republican model citizens on the Watauga Board of Elections called the question on appointing former Watauga GOP Chair Matt Snyder as the elections director to replace the retiring Jane Ann Hodges. They voted 2-1 to call the question, but Chair Luke Eggers was so eager to get out of that room that he neglected to then conduct the vote on the actual appointment of Mr. Snyder. So there's that.

And this: it came out during the meeting that Chair Eggers had interviewed none -- zero -- of the almost dozen applicants for the job, including his own guy Matt Snyder. If that doesn't rise to the level of official incompetence, what would? Not to mention a blatant failure to perform even the most elementary tasks that go with being Chair of the Board of Elections. He interviewed no one. Because other men tell him what to do, what to think, where to be, and he obediently does it.

The reason is fairly obvious. He had been told by stronger and smarter men weeks ago who he would be putting into the job, so indeed ... why would he need to interview any applicant?

Minority BOE member Kathleen Campbell said it all very clearly in her remarks:

"...My fellow Board members have refused repeatedly to go forward with a search for the best-qualified person for this job. They refused in spite of the fact that this search would have cost nothing. They also never advertised the position on the County's website. Why would someone do this? There is only one reason. Because they already had chosen the person they wanted behind the scenes and were not interested in who might actually be non-partisan and qualified for the position. That's why Mr. Eggers put forward just one name, and Mr. Aceto never put forward any at all. Once another 9 people found out through the grapevine that there was a job opening, they applied for the position. Mr. Eggers has never interviewed any of these people at all -- even Mr. Snyder -- who told me last Friday that he had not heard from Mr. Eggers since he sent him a resume, right after he heard about Ms. Hodges retiring. Instead, Bill [Aceto] met with him about the job. But, in spite of never speaking to him, Luke [Eggers] had already made up his mind .... I cannot understand how this constitutes competence...."

It constitutes something, but it ain't competence.

The big laugh-out-loud moment came when Bill Aceto defended himself to Deborah Greene, who had applied for the job and who never got an interview. She said so during public comment. Mr. Aceto addressed himself to Greene, saying that her political activism had disqualified her from the job. At which point there were guffaws in the audience, some of whom apparently saw the glaring inconsistency of saying Deb Greene was too much the activist while the former Chair of the Watauga GOP, Mr. Snyder, gets off that hook scott free.

Kim Strach

What has never ceased to amaze this observer of this Board of Elections, since they took office in August of 2013, is the utter bland transparency of their every partisan move. Once again, they've plugged in their own personal neon sign for the world to see: "WE ARE PARTISAN HACKS WHO JUST APPOINTED ANOTHER PARTISAN HACK WHO'LL DO AS HE'S TOLD AND TILT FUTURE ELECTIONS OUR WAY."

If Kim Strach, Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, who has the final say on the appointment of Mr. Snyder, doesn't blush down to her designer footwear over the sheer balls of this appointment, then she too in supremely incompetent in her job.

Power and Powerlessness and the NC GOP

Politics in North Carolina right now -- if you have any progressive leanings at all, or even moderate leanings -- just suck ass. Public education, starved; the door slammed on the unemployed; a loud "eff off!" to at least 200,000, and probably many more, who would benefit from health insurance provided through Medicaid. The state's natural resources -- air, water, native scenery -- betrayed to high-dollar industries that basically don't give a shit.

Not to mention the deliberate hobbling of ballot access in North Carolina, especially for black voters but also especially for college students. Everyone was talking about photo voter i.d. requirements and how they would disproportionately impact the poor and the black. But the most transparent and little-talked-about voter disenfranchisement was the provision that will disallow college-issued photo i.d.s. and most out-of-state driver's licenses. That deliberate targeting of college students is in a subsection of the deceptively named "ACT TO RESTORE CONFIDENCE IN GOVERNMENT BY ESTABLISHING THE VOTER INFORMATION VERIFICATION ACT" (H589), passed by the Republicans and signed by Gov. McCrory in 2013.

Another little noted provision in H589 targets college students in another way. The new rule says that if you are a legitimately registered voter, even a legitimately registered voter who has voted in prior elections, and if you walk into your polling place on election day, and it turns out to be the wrong polling place because you have moved since the last election and forgot to put in a "change of address" -- or were just plain confused about where you're supposed to be -- the new Republican majority in the General Assembly now won't let you vote, even provisionally, in that precinct. No, you have to vote in your assigned precinct -- "does anyone know where the Laurel Fork Baptist Church is?"

Republicans haven't had such unlimited power for a long time. Their first irresistible impulse was to legislate morality, especially the morality of women, most especially young women, but also the moral failures of the young generally, and they see an 18-year-old, first-time voter's confusion as nothing less than a moral failure.

I read on Republican blogs that commenters seem to think that failure to put in a change-of-address form, or to forget, or to simply not know ("where is Mt. Vernon Church?") -- that such "libtards" deserve what they get. College students shouldn't be voting anyway where they go to school because they're not from around here. So much for the democratic principle that every adult in our society should have ballot access, no matter their pedigree, race, or place of residence.

Well, as we know, a lack of knowledge can make you powerless. Being new to a system or a process makes you vulnerable, and the powerful feed on weakness of all kinds.

Power and Powerlessness in Watauga County

As the Watauga GOP has demonstrated through one of its public policy arms, the Watauga Board of Elections, Appalachian State student voters are pretty much powerless. Except when others file a law suit on their behalf, and a senior superior court judge, seconded by the NC Court of Appeals, rules that the State Board of Elections violated the rights of young voters when it approved the obviously suppressive Early Voting plan passed by local BOE Republicans Bill Aceto and Luke Eggers in 2013.

I get why the Republican power structure -- both locally and statewide -- is throwing its weight around. Their own genesis story casts them as God's Chosen People, a despised minority who suffered a hundred years of political banishment and profound powerlessness. Republicans in North Carolina were abused for generations, as Democrats ran the state, top to bottom. Feeling abandoned and powerless, impotent in the face of the powerful, will cause political gastric reflux.

Political gastric reflux. That feeling of powerlessness -- "there's nothing we can do to beat them!" -- can suddenly metastacize into something really toxic when conditions suddenly change. The current crop of Republican leaders, put suddenly in charge of everything following 2010, have turned into their own version of the scourge of God. It's their turn now. They have the upper-hand, and that hand holds a whip.

I get that psychology. And I can dig it. Any political party that stays in complete control, has the power for too long, becomes corrupt. The old Democratic Party was corrupted by men at the top. You remember their names, including at least one recent governor. That corrupt power deserved its comeuppance in 2010.

The new Republican overlords appear to be getting to the same corrupt place in record time. Total power inevitably breeds its own burrowing cabbage worm. Eventually, arrogance will do you in.

Not only did the Watauga GOP manipulate ballot access against college students, they manipulated polling places to move the most populous Boone city precinct far out to the countryside. They targeted the Elections Director Jane Anne Hodges, an acknowledged expert in elections law and an even-handed administrator, for elimination, and after months of harassment and meanness they have finally succeeded in forcing her retirement. They will replace her with a partisan who will not be open and fair. Take that to the bank.

The Republican Chair of the Watauga County Commission, Nathan Miller, sued Kathleen Campbell, the Democratic member of the Watauga BOE, for access to all her emails. The motive: retaliation for the public records requests that outed Republican County Attorney Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") as the real puppet-master behind the disenfranchisement plans of the BOE and the discovery that State BOE Republican member Paul Foley had been colluding with Four Eggers in secret.

When the Republican majority on the Watauga County Board of Commissioners discovered that by law they were responsible for paying Kathleen Campbell's legal defense against Nathan Miller's lawsuit, they attempted to foist their pick for attorney off on her, and when she insisted on her own lawyer, they're now refusing to pay her legal bills.

That's the current exercise of power in Watauga County.

I feel strongly for powerless college students as well as for innocent public officials because I know that there's danger in always feeling impotent. It can become a self-fulfilling habit of acquiescing: "Shit! I can't do anything about this, about them, so I just keep my head down, drink beer, and pay no attention to what's happening. I can’t do anything about it, and the end is near at hand anyway.”

Not just acquiesing -- accepting what others demand -- but also falling into quiescence, being too worn out by defeat to even talk back while you're being pounded into submission.

That's the death stinger in the tail of powerlessness. You get used to just taking it, or you develop the armor of not caring because you're "above it all," or you're glued to the meta-reality of mobile devices and have no inkling of what is actually being done to you and, through you, to the future of this society.

Why a Polling Place in the ASU Student Union?

Aceto & Eggers. Photo by Lonnie Webster

Below is minority member of the Watauga Board of Elections Kathleen Campbell's prepared statement that she delivered last night, shortly before Luke Eggers and Bill Aceto voted to prove that they are seeking partisan advantage by making it difficult for ASU students to vote.

One might think that the local GOP would begin developing a strategy for winning the hearts and minds of college students, rather than communicating hostility toward that age group. Is there any wonder why 18-25 year-olds don't flock to the Republican banner?

Everything said for public consumption by GOP leaders, including what Bill Aceto said at last night's Board of Elections meeting and especially what gets written on the Watauga Conservative, acknowledges that additional barriers have indeed been set up to discourage college student voting. That acknowledgement comes with the repeated statement that students shouldn't mind a few extra blocks to walk. They were singled out for a longer hike. That is the indisputable fact, and I believe most college-age voters totally get the purpose of that.

Campbell's statement:

Tonight I am proposing two things, one about early voting and one about election-day voting. I am presenting them together because they are related. Both are necessary to avoid abridging the rights of citizens to equal and fair voting opportunities, especially those voters who are 18 – 21 years old. The 26th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits such an abridgement of this specific group of voters.

I am proposing:

1. An early voting plan that will put an early voting site on the campus of ASU in the Linville Falls Room of the Student Union Building.

2. Moving the election-day polling place for the Boone #2 Precinct, one of the two precincts that serve the campus and the only precinct located on campus, from the Legends nightclub to the Linville Falls Room at the Student Union.

The importance of these two proposals becomes clearer when you consider the following facts:

· The enrollment of ASU constitutes almost 34% of the total population of Watauga County and an even greater number of the voting population. No other county even comes close to a college population with that large a share of the county population. Jackson County, with WCU, comes closest at just under 25%.

· The ASU community consists largely of people between the ages of 18-21. As we have all discussed before, this age group in particular has demanding class schedules and remote access to cars if any access at all.

· While some students maintain their voter registration outside Watauga County, they have a right recognized in State and federal law to register and vote in Watauga, where they make their home during the time they are in college. A large number have done so. In fact, a full 13% of Watauga’s registered voters is 18-21 years old, lives in dorms on ASU’s campus, and 100% of them live in the Boone 2 and Boone 3 precincts, which together encompass the campus. A larger percentage could do so if they wanted.

· Because of their difficulties with transportation, students at ASU in the past have chosen to cast early ballots. Also because of their transportation challenges, students have voted provisional ballots on Election Day outside their precincts at the ASU polling location. This is particularly true for students living on the west side of campus, whose Boone 3 Election Day polling location is at the Agricultural Conference Center, at least a 20 minute one-way walk along rough roads with no shoulders.

· In 2013, the General Assembly severely limited two methods that students found helpful in overcoming their difficulties voting. The legislators removed the first week from the early voting period, squeezing the time to early-vote into about two weeks. And, except for voters with unreported moves, the legislators prohibited the counting of all out-of-precinct provisional and/or transfer ballots on Election Day. A lawsuit in federal court, filed by students outside Watauga, is challenging both those legislative actions as unconstitutional to the rights of young voters and a violation of the 26th Amendment.

· In the wake of these losses of early voting opportunities and out-of-precinct provisional/transfer voting, one would expect County boards of elections to find ways to accommodate the needs that caused student voters to utilize those methods. The boards could put early voting sites and precinct polling places in more accessible places. Some county boards of elections in counties with large campuses have, if not making things better, at least not making them worse. But inexplicably, in Watauga, which has by far the highest percentage of campus enrollment to voting age population in the State, we have gone in the opposite direction.

· Over the expressed needs of over 30% of our registered voters, and in spite of the fact that over 17,000 students, faculty and staff work and/or study on ASU’s campus, our Board proposed an early voting plan that would no longer include an early voting site on campus. We took away the ASU Student Union site in 2013, a site where more voters per hour cast ballots than at any other early voting site in 2009.

· As a result of eliminating ASU’s early voting site, we saw an astonishing 79% increase in provisional votes cast on Election Day between the Municipal elections of 2009 and 2013 (after which the state took away that option).

· Then, to make matters even worse, we moved the only on-campus voting location, Boone 2, from the Student Union to the obviously inadequate (as expressed by both ASU and our own Director) Legends nightclub, as far away from young voters and all the faulty and staff as we could get.

· The results of this Board’s actions are now in.

· Even though both early and election day voting have been reasonably strong countywide in the last two elections, voting in Boone 2 has fallen by almost 58% between the last two elections, and, in Boone 3, voting has fallen by almost 30%.

· Voting by the County’s 18-21 year old voters has suffered even worse between the last two elections, dramatically so. In Boone 2, votes cast by 18-21 year olds is down 80%, and in Boone 3, voting by 18-21 year olds is down almost 50%.

· For the 2013 Municipal elections, we offered a single early voting site downtown. While we did increase overall turnout by 1.18% in 2013 compared to the 2009 Municipal, this was the result of a 1.26% increase in mail-in ballots. And then, as the result of inadequate one-stop location siting in 2014, we saw an even more dramatic increase in the county’s number of mail-in ballots, up almost 42% higher than even the previous election.

· Comparing the 2010 Primary Election (when an early voting site and Student Union Election Day site were available, and when provisional/transfer voting was allowed) to the 2014 Primary election (when neither were available), total votes cast on the ASU campus has now resulted in a 75% decrease. As a result, the average age of total voters who cast ballots countywide increased in 2014 by 8 years.

· Ballots cast by mail increased by over 50% for both Democrats and Unaffiliated voters from the 2010 to the 2014 primary, while requests for mail-in ballots for Republicans fell by 32%. And because this Board eliminated two of the three in-town early voting locations, Democratic performance fell in one-stop voting by almost 4 percent from 2010 to 2014 while republican performance increased almost 3%.

· The number of votes cast in Boone 2 in 2013 on ASU’s campus location fell by almost 58% in 2014, primarily from the lack of a one-stop site combined with the disallowance of provisional ballots.

· And One-stop voting across all precincts fell from 40% of the vote in 2013 to 35% of the total vote in 2014 even though we offered 5 times the number of one-stop locations.

· This is what has happened when these voters were given the one-two-three-four punch of losing a week of early voting, losing out-of-precinct provisional voting, losing an early voting site on campus, and getting unsuitable voting places on election day. The results are disheartening, but not surprising.

· Plus all this, what we are doing in siting our one-stop locations is a waste of money and staff and a frustration for voters. Of the 5 one-stop locations we used in this May’s primary, the single downtown early voting location took in over 72% of all early voters. And that’s because people drive right past the remote sites we’d offered to come and vote downtown. 37% of the Meat Camp early voters voted somewhere other than the Meat Camp Fire Department. The same is true for all the other remote sites as well. Even one-fourth of Blowing Rock’s early ballots were cast in downtown Boone.

· If we assume a similar turnout for this November’s general election as we had in 2010 (and frankly I believe that’s low), we should expect to receive 7,522 total one-stop voters downtown; that’s a 342% increase from the number we had just this past primary. And we’re looking at 5,416 voters trying to use the single downtown site for early voting alone. Where are we going to park all these people? How are we going to handle the 86 expected voters per hour for early voting at the downtown location this November as opposed to the 26 per hour we averaged this past primary?

· In the 2010 General Election, we offered just three sites, and none of them accommodated more than 38 voters per hour because the other 2 in-town locations eased the traffic at the downtown location. It’s simply a no-brainer to offer an early voting site in ASU’s Student Union. There is plenty of parking, the space exceeds all of our criteria, many if not most of our registered voters live and/or work there, and the public has it made it clear they want the site.

The elections this board has supervised since it took office have been important but relatively small. They should be used as a shakedown cruise for the major election facing us this fall. We now have an opportunity to learn from that shakedown cruise and give our voters an election in which everyone can have confidence. 

The Comedic Stylings of Bill Aceto

Last night's meeting of the Watauga County Board of Elections had one laugh-out-loud moment. As the two-man Republican majority was turning down third member Kathleen Campbell's proposal to restore an Early Voting site to the campus of Appalachian State University, Board Secretary Bill Aceto said that he thought voters deserved consistency of polling locations. As though the Republican Early Voting plan represented something decades old and hoary with veneration.

Couldn't help flashing on the morning of August 12, 2013, at Mr. Aceto's very first Board of Elections meeting after being newly sworn into office. He and Luke Eggers upended the apple basket pretty thoroughly, voting to combine Boone 1, 2 & 3 precincts into a single mega-precinct, removing the Early Voting site on the ASU campus (where it had been consistently for several election cycles), and moving the in-town polling station for New River 3 far out into the country for the upcoming municipal elections.

Consistency? Not so much.

Naked partisanship twisting the right to vote into a pretzel? Absolutely!

Oh Look! Circles on Maps (And Other Shiny Objects)

Watauga Board of Elections honcho Bill Aceto had a map of Watauga County with yellow circles on it at the March 5 meeting of the board, which passed 2-1 the Republican plan for Early Voting in the May 6 primary, a plan based on those circles.

The five equally sized circles, radiating out from Aceto's five proposed Early Voting sites, were meant to prove that Aceto had considered "geography" in his proposal.

But Mr. Aceto's yellow circles are the illusion of geographical consideration, since they do not show roads, which voters actually travel on to vote, nor do they show population density ("demography"). The circle emanating from the Watauga County Admin Bldg in downtown Boone encompasses roughly 60% or more of Watauga County voters. How many voters are inside the circle centered on the Deep Gap Fire Department? Since that Deep Gap circle also takes in a nice chunk of Wilkes County, are we counting those voters too? (The Blowing Rock circle includes an even larger piece of Caldwell County.)

Simply drawing a 5-mile radius around a location and expecting every voter in that circle to use that location is laughable at best. It ignores completely the fact that voters use roads to access sites, and those voters will cast their ballots at the most convenient location. The evidence of that is clear in the 2012 and 2008 one-stop statistics. Some 30-40% of voters who lived within a mile of a one-stop location in Cove Creek and Foscoe chose instead to drive PAST those locations and cast their ballots in the Town of Boone, many of them in the Appalachian State University Student Union. (This fact is made abundantly clear in Kathleen Campbell's alternative Early Voting plan filed with the StateBoard of Elections.)

In this mountainous county, Mr. Aceto's yellow circles also disregard that all areas within one of his radiuses do not enjoy "inter-connectivity." The shortest distances between points in Watauga County are rarely feasible for travel. You have to follow existing roads, and Mr. Aceto's maps show no existing roads. His circles are meaningless fantasies.

Aceto is required by statute to consider geography. He's also required to consider demography, where people actually live. His map does no such thing. His map wants to assume that every radius contains the same density of population, which is preposterous.

And what about the significant slices of Watauga County that aren't within the radius of any of Mr. Aceto's circles? How are we to regard their role in the scheme of magic circles?

A man can stick a compass on a map and draw circles all day. It's not going to conceal the real purpose of why he stuck his compass where he did … to make it more difficult for one class of voters to get to the polls and to advantage his own party in upcoming elections.

Challenge To Bill Aceto's Early Voting Plan Will Be Heard Monday in Cary

Kathleen Campbell, the lone Democrat on the Watauga County Board of Elections, has submitted her complaint about the majority Republican plan for Early Voting in Watauga County, along with her own alternative plan. Her argument is supported by many exhibits, including maps and demographic information about the county. A hearing to determine which plan will prevail will be held before the State Board of Elections this coming Monday in Cary, 4 p.m., at the Cary Embassy Suites.

Bottomline: Campbell's Early Voting plan restores Early Voting on the campus of Appalachian State University and also places Early Voting polls at the Board of Elections, Boone Town Hall, Meat Camp VFD, Blowing Rock Town Hall, and the Western Watauga Community Center. Campbell's plan also does away with the sheer stupidity of closing all Early Voting at 4 p.m. each day, extending the hours into the evening for the convenience of working people. Plus Campbell presents ample evidence that her plan will actually cost less than the Aceto plan. Campbell's argument accuses the Aceto Plan of voter suppression against young voters, non-white voters, urban/suburban voters, and Democratic and Unaffiliated voters.

In making the argument for a polling place on the ASU campus, Campbell maintains that the Republican/Aceto plan deliberately discriminates against 18- to 21-year-olds, which you cannot do, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. In United States v. State of Texas (1978, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in the landmark Symm v. U.S., 1979), this crucial point was made about "fencing" off young voters from the opportunity to vote:

 …forcing young voters to undertake special burdens -- obtaining absentee ballots, or traveling to one centralized location in each city, for example -- in order to exercise their right to vote might well serve to dissuade them from participating in the election. This result and the election procedures that create it, are at least inconsistent with the purpose of the Voting Rights Act, which sought to encourage greater political participation on the part of the young, such segregation might even amount to a denial of their 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the laws.

There is not one sentient being in Watauga County who does not understand that the Republican agenda since last August has been the active discouragement of voting by ASU students. Campbell's argument to the State Board of Elections exposes that discrimination with great clarity and convincing detail.

There's a great deal more in Campbell's Early Voting submission, which we'll continue to unpack as we approach next Monday's hearing. The full document and all the exhibits are linked above for your own leisure reading.