Tsunami Hits Boone

It was a wave election, propelled in no small part by the seismic shifts at the Watauga County Board of Elections and the shenanigans of the #EggersBros.

Bertrand Gutierrez's lede in the Winston-Salem Journal cuts to the chase: "For a couple of Republicans who, according to Democrats, were intent on suppressing votes, Luke Eggers and Bill Aceto did a poor job."

Eggers and Aceto are busily saying, "See, we're not a partisan Board of Elections. See, we didn't attempt to suppress the vote."

The eleven hundred plus Boone voters who did not choose #TeamTempleton are saying, "See what happens when you try to monkey with ballot access."

Mayor-Elect Andy Ball said it effectively in the Gutierrez article: “This result in some ways speaks to the visceral reaction people have when you try to take people’s voting rights away.”

Meanwhile, near the River Nile, Mark Templeton, who had suggested that he was going to show progressive activists the quickest way to get the hell outta Dodge, was fingering Boone as a "liberal college town" in explaining #TeamTempleton's massive losses.

That will become the company line (and of course doubles back to explain what the #EggersBros were up to all along): the ASU college student vote and the local Republican belief that all their electoral woes are a result of it.

Based on our phone canvassing and door-knocking during the last several months, the Templeton ownership of the local Republican Party had a major depressive influence on registered Republicans. Many Republicans were as offended by the treatment of ASU student voters as Democrats were. I think analysis of "party performance" in yesterday's election is going to show that it wasn't the student vote that won it as much as failure of the Republican base to turn out in support of #TeamTempleton.

Let's face it: the current management of the Watauga GOP has caused its own train wreck, and one wonders what the rank and file will do to untangle to wreckage.

Resistance Is Futile

Anna Oakes gets on the money trail of Team Templeton in the Watauga Democrat, and Jeff Templeton is forthcoming on why his family has felt it necessary to bludgeon and then buy Boone's town government: They're doing it all to save Watauga County!

"We warned the town council that the over-reaching regulations could have the unintended consequence of encouraging large-scale apartment development outside the town's planning jurisdiction, and now we see that prediction coming true with The Cottages [of Boone]," sez Jeff.

Got that logic? Because Boone now regulates high-density development on steep slopes within its limits, all the obnoxious, destructive, and dangerous development moves out into the county (and Watauga County allows virtually anything). Therefore, O my Brethren, the Town of Boone is totally responsible for that hair-raising development on the ridge known as The Cottages of Boone. And for everything else you see in Watauga County that you don't like.

High Country Press photo

With logic like that, Team Templeton is going to make marvelous overlords! And with the money they've got they're clearly intent on doing whatever it takes to win. Just this week, we've heard of three different violations of the law committed by Team Templeton:

1. Stuffing their flyers into people's mailboxes -- a Federal offense

2. Putting out a flyer with a "Paid for" line listing a local business, which is also illegal under North Carolina law.

3. We are told that Mark Templeton was doing a robocall to cell phone numbers, which is another Federal offense.

Team Templeton, On the Comedy Circuit

Much laughter in some quarters over the Republican Party campaign mailer, "Elect the Sunshine Ticket" (pictured on the Watauga Conservative blog site).

Team Templeton, the folks who gave us a fradulent and ghost-written Board of Elections, is going to bring the sunshine back to Boone?

Burning question: why did they throw candidate James Milner off the bus, or under it?

We thank Anne Marie Templeton Yates for giving us inspiration for this Sunday morning music video:

Brace Yourself, Boone

Citizens for Change, the notorious political action committee of 2007, is returning, with Jeff Templeton at its head. (See the Certification to Return to Active Status for political action committee, "Citizens For Change," below.)

A little history from 2007: Citizens for Change formed primarily to fight the new Steep Slope Development ordinance and to rout the progressives in Boone. The PAC endorsed a slate of four candidates that year, one mayoral candidate and three town council candidates, one of them a multiple-term incumbent. Out of those four PAC candidates, only one of them won, but in the process their multiple-term incumbent (and most experienced public official) lost. (The Watauga Democrat did an eve-of-election run-down on all the candidates and the issues at that time. And please note that in 2007, Boone's municipal election was on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in October.)

The coverage of the Chamber of Commerce candidate forum that year in the Watauga Democrat makes interesting reading too, especially the report that developer Phil Templeton, Jeff Templeton's father and a prime mover in Citizens for Change, heckled incumbent candidate Lynne Mason from the audience.

We note that the Certification to Return to Active Status (pictured below) was dated October 3, which means that the PAC will not under current law have to report any contributions or expenditures until well after the election is over, in January 2014. We note that because the timing seems intentional, as though someone were willing to hide out until after the planned damage has been done.

For the record, in 2007 Citizens for Change raised $45,426.12 and spent most of it. That total in cash does not count what Phil Templeton individually spent on multiple newspaper ads (many of them full-page), though he was also a big donor to Citizens for Change.

Also for the record, and in case anyone has forgotten the full extent of current Templeton family power: Phil's daughter (and Jeff's sister) Anne Marie Yates is chair of the Watauga County Republican Party and is named in one of the charges currently pending against the Republican majority on the Watauga County Board of Elections. Anne Marie Yates is married to Perry Yates, a new Watauga County Commissioner, and she is sister of Mark Templeton, a candidate for Boone Town Council in the November elections. Mark Templeton made a Citizens for Change-style endorsement of Matt Long and James Milner at the candidate forum last Tuesday, and presumably it is this "Team Templeton" that will be the object of affection for the reactivated Citizens for Change.

The Lesson of Pete Gilbert

Pete Gilbert, standing. Montravius King,
2nd from right

Pete Gilbert is the chairman of the Pasquotank County Republican Party. Pete Gilbert successfully induced the Republican majority on the Pasquotank County Board of Elections to kick Montravius King off the Elizabeth City municipal ballot. Pete Gilbert hated the idea of college students voting in local elections, let along running for local office. Pete Gilbert got scolded for that at the State Board of Elections hearing which ended up reinstating Montravius King to the ballot. On Tuesday of this week, Montravius King won a seat on the Elizabeth City town council, becoming the youngest elected official in the entire state of North Carolina.

We can't resist wondering how Pete Gilbert feels today. He had bragged, back when he was successfully suppressing Montravius King, that he was going to take his crusade against college students across the state, and Civitas Action was clearly gearing up to help him. Susan Myrick of Civitas, who sat next to Gilbert when he got Montravius kicked off the ballot, was subsequently seen conferring with Republican Party officials in Watauga County.

Mark Templeton

Anne Marie Yates, Chair of the Watauga County Republican Party, could not contain her glee about secret plans to hobble the voting of Appalachian State University students. She and other Republicans had a plan that was going to get her brother Mark Templeton elected to the Boone Town Council. Mr. Templeton made it clear at Tuesday night's candidate forum in Boone that he was the leader of a handpicked team of the other Republicans candidates, Matt Long and James Milner.

Anne Marie Yates burbled about her plans to get that team into office to a Watauga Democrat reporter, and that interview has since become an exhibit in the petition to remove the Republican members of the Watauga County Board of Elections for malfeasance.

One of those two Republican members of the Watauga BOE, Bill Aceto, also could not contain his glee at what was about to happen to Watauga County voters (more specifically, ASU voters) at the notorious August 12th meeting of the Watauga BOE. According to the petition referenced above, Aceto told a Democratic candidate in the upcoming election that he and Luke Eggers were about to take the gloves off.

Pete Gilbert might have words of wisdom for these folks, if Pete Gilbert has learned anything in the meantime.

Inside the Watauga GOP

The local Republican Party held an event last night at the Fairway Cafe on the Boone golf course, and Jimmy Hodges stood up and said he was changing his party affiliation and will run for County Commissioner in 2014 from Nathan Miller's Meat Camp district.

Jimmy Hodges was a registered Democrat when he sat on the County Commission from 1996-2004. He retired from the real estate business in 2009.

Our snitch said that all three Republican Boone Town Council candidates -- Mark Templeton, Matt Long, and James Milner -- were there, and they spoke. Candidate for Boone Mayor John Mena was not there, even though he's been publicly endorsed by the party chair Anne Marie Yates. County Commissioner David Blust announced that he will be running for reelection in 2014. Current County Commission Chair Nathan Miller spoke about his candidacy for District Attorney. According to my source, "He trashed the local DA's office." Britt Springer, a Republican member of that office and also a candidate for DA, was there, and at first party chair Anne Marie Yates was not going to allow her to speak, but Springer insisted. Snitch sez, "Springer knocked it out of the park."

No word on how many ASU College Republicans made it out to the golf course, but the local party was offering free tickets to any member of that club who wrote an email to the State Board of Elections supporting the selection of Legends nightclub for the Boone 2 polling place. Caroline Hartman is the president of the ASU College Republicans, and she's a good soldier:

Meanwhile, Republican insurgents are calling for the removal of Anne Marie Yates from her position as chair of the local party and spilling certain beans about a now notorious August 29 meeting (about which we had already heard from party insurgent and perennial pariah, Deborah Greene).

This Has Been a Lip-Smacking, Gob-Smacking August. It May Get Worse for Some

The lip-smacking of Watauga County Republican/Tea Party activists this past spring over the thought of taking over the Watauga Board of Elections was loud and obnoxious. They were publicly celebrating the idea that they would soon...

1. Fire elections director Jane Anne Hodges, the 27-year veteran in the Board of Elections.

2. Put an end to the voting of those pesky college students at Appalachian State University.

And then the local universe would belong to them forever and ever amen!

But there's many a slip between the fork and the mouth. First (and for reasons never publicly explained), the Republican choice for the chairmanship of the Watauga County Board of Elections, Stacy Eggers IV ("Four") was rejected at the state level, and the man that the State Board appointed, Mr. Jim Hastings, declined the appointment. A lot of serious time was eaten up by that SNAFU, and a deadline loomed: The Implementation Plan for Early Voting in the Boone Municipals needed to be submitted to the state by August 16.

The Republicans needed a chair of the Board that they could control, someone who would take orders, and it may yet turn out to be one of their biggest blunders in decades that they decided to appoint Four Eggers' little brother Luke. He was seriously not ready for prime time.

Then the Watauga County Republican Party Chair Anne Marie Yates appeared in the Watauga Democrat, giving evidence that a conspiracy existed to massively alter the ability of college students to vote, which would (we're sure it was a coincidence) help her brother Mark Templeton and Matt Long and James Milner and John Mena sweep the Boone Town Council elections in November.

With the August 16th deadline pushing him, Luke Eggers rushed to get himself sworn into office and to hold a meeting as the new Chair of the Board that would do all the stuff that is now the subject of state-wide and national attention.

The pushback was perhaps unexpected. The negative publicity was perhaps not really thought through. The legal recourse for Boone voters was perhaps not fully anticipated. (Hell, Anne Marie Yates may already be in the witness relocation program or is otherwise not speaking to the press in an undisclosed location.)

Now comes the state Board of Elections, which clearly does not like the press coverage of Watauga County. The new Republican Chair of the State Board, Josh Howard, gave an interview to the Raleigh News & Observer last week, and he said this:

“It may disappoint a lot of folks that there’s still a steady hand on the rudder.”

That was a somewhat cryptic utterance that can be read in a couple of ways. Mr. Howard also told the 500 new board members and staff people from across the state at their training day in Cary:

Board members are supposed to assure voting takes place in compliance with the law. Decision-making should not be rooted in party politics....

It's an open question what Mr. Howard meant by that and what he's prepared to do to prove to the world that the NC State Board of Elections is not now rooted in (revenge) politics.

"Convenience": What It Means to Anne Marie Yates

Chairwoman of the Watauga County Republican Party, Anne Marie Yates, well in advance of yesterday's meeting of the Board of Elections (BOE), told Kellen Short of the Watauga Democrat that the combination of Boone 1, Boone 2, and Boone 3 precincts into a single "mega-precinct" would still be "very convenient for everyone to go and vote."

Boone 1, Boone 2, and Boone 3 precincts are where the major concentrations of Appalachian State University students live. Two of those precincts had -- until yesterday's train wreck of a BOE meeting -- polling places on campus. Until yesterday's BOE meeting, ASU also had an Early Voting site which served 2,500 faculty and staff and some considerable portion of 17,589 students. It was a heavily utilized Early Voting site. It was, in fact and in keeping with Anne Marie Yates's word choice, convenient.

Nothing's convenient now. The new polling place for all three of those Boone precincts is now located at the Agricultural Conference Center on the far western edge of what had been Boone 3 -- in other words, as far as the Republicans could locate the polling place from ASU and still remain technically within the borders of the new mega-precinct. There are no sidewalks along Poplar Grove Road. Walking there is most inconvenient.

Does Anne Marie Yates really think that we're that stupid? Does she think the student voters at ASU won't notice the attempt to discourage, limit, and suppress their vote so that her brother Mark Templeton, and the rest of the "Templeton ticket" on the ballot this fall, can take control of the Boone Town Council?

That's the convenience she's looking for.

We trust the voters of Boone will show the Templetons some truth at the ballot boxes this fall, since Anne Marie in particular appears unfamiliar with it.

Watauga Co. Board of Elections, 8/12/13: The Long & the Short of It

The Short Of It
The newly constituted county Board of Elections met this morning and, among other (non-controversial) moves, the two-man Republican majority voted to do the following (every vote was 2-1, with Democratic member Kathleen Campbell both objecting to the process and voting no when given the chance), a series of unprecedented and ground-shaking resolutions clearly meant to hamper voting, not improve it. The content of these resolutions was largely a mystery to the 70 or so citizens in the crowd, and the upshot of the various clauses in these resolutions was of major concern to Ms. Campbell, since she had not seen any of the resolutions prior to the meeting:

1. Rewrote the duties of the elections supervisor, specifying that Jane Anne Hodges is prohibited from being involved in "the discussion or debate of political or discretionary decisions [!]... regarding the location or number of polling places or early voting sites and hours." She is further required to keep a log "of all telephone calls and visitors," and must never be allowed to be in the elections office alone during any polling period.

2. Resolutions to establish a public comment provision: This new board decrees that only written comment will be acceptable.

3. One-Stop Implementation Plan for the 2013 municipal elections: ASU Student Union site, closed. One site only: Commissioner's Boardroom.

4. Resolution to combine three precincts, Boone 1, Boone 2, and Boone 3 into a single precinct with the polling place at the Agricultural Conference Center. This would put over 9,000 voters into a single mega-precinct, when state voting guidelines recommend no more than 1,500 voters per precinct.

5. Move the Meat Camp polling place to the new Meat Camp fire department and move the New River 3 precinct polling place from the Armory to Mutton's Crossing on Bamboo Rd.

The Long of It
The official meeting was called to order in the tiny conference room inside the Board of Elections, a room that will hold eight people, max, but which was packed with maybe 20 spectators, hovering over the conference table and the three board members, with another 50 or 60 people packed into the lobby and straining to hear.

The board members wisely decided to move the meeting back to where it was originally scheduled, the Commissioner's Boardroom in the Administrative Annex. But the move was not allowed until after the two Republicans elected themselves Chair and Secretary of the board. Kathleen Campbell, the lone Democrat, also took her time verbally spanking the the two Republicans for cutting her out of the information loop while evidently working behind the scenes and secretly with Anne Marie Yates, Chair of the Watauga County Republican Party and brother to Mark Templeton, candidate for Boone Town Council in the upcoming municipal elections. The resolutions that were suddenly sprung into view this morning were clearly -- transparently -- intended to make it easier for the Templeton ticket to win. "You boys should be ashamed of yourselves," Campbell said, to sustained applause.

Campbell said she had written emails over the weekend to both new Chair Luke Eggers and new Secretary Bill Aceto, requesting copies of the resolutions mentioned on the agenda that became public last Friday, but she received nothing in advance of this morning's meeting. Luke Eggers answered that he didn't want to be in violation of the open meetings act, which he thought he would be if he had answered Campbell's email, at which the large crowd burst out with guffaws at the irony of it. Campbell replied that this whole special meeting was in violation of the open meetings act.

Once the meeting was reconvened in the Commissioners Boardroom, which was soon almost full of spectators, the new board quickly got to the controversial resolutions, the first of which was the rewriting of Jane Anne Hodges' job description. Ms. Campbell kept insisting that the resolution be read aloud and discussed as to what had been changed, and Eggers/Aceto kept resisting the sharing of the resolution with the crowd, which grew increasingly restive and vocal about what seemed like a railroad (a badly run railroad at that). Finally, Jane Anne Hodges was allowed to identify what she saw as new in the list of duties, after a quick read -- because she too did not have an advance copy of the resolutions. The provision that decreed that Ms. Hodges could not be in the office alone once Early Voting began caused the most heartburn, as she is well known to work very long hours and wondered aloud about requiring -- and paying for -- another employee to always be there with her. Hanging in the air, and never openly addressed, was the implication that Ms. Hodges would do something dishonest if she were by herself, a patently offensive suggestion not based on anything but malice. "Did your brother [Four Eggers, attorney for the Republican majority on the County Commission and a past member of the Board of Elections] assist in the preparation of this document?" Campbell asked Luke Eggers, to which she got no direct answer. "I think this is an illegal action," Ms. Campbell said, after the Republicans passed their resolution, "and I hope we can take action to remedy it." Sustained applause.

The resolution to "establish public comment" again prompted Campbell to demand that the resolution be read aloud, since no one knew what was in it and since it did, after all, directly impact "the public." "I have not received any information on the public comment process that you're about to vote on. I think we should post this so that the public can read it and react to it before we enact it," Campbell said. "No one knows what's in it except you [Luke Eggers] and Bill Aceto," Campbell added. The crowd began chanting "Read it! Read it." Luke Eggers insisted that Campbell would have to make a motion to read the resolution before it could be read. Campbell made her motion. No one seconded it. Only the pandemonium in the room kept the two Republicans from voting on it at that point. Instead, they allowed Ms. Campbell to read it aloud. When she got to the clause that only written comments will be taken, the crowd erupted anew. Eggers said, "I appreciate the passion on these issues, but I urge you to keep decorum." A member of the audience then approached the podium and handed a slip of paper across to the board, saying, "You said you wanted written comments."

The resolution up-ending the one-stop implementation plan for the 2013 municipal elections, a plan that was already voted on and approved unanimously by the previous Board of Elections last June, a plan that set up two Early Voting sites including the Student Union at ASU, again had the audience groaning, shouting out, and applauding the comments of Ms. Campbell. The new plan -- if not literally written by Anne Marie Yates, was at least written for the benefit of her family in this upcoming election -- axes the Student Union Early Voting site. Ms. Campbell pointed out to "the boys" that they needed, according to statute, a unanimous vote to approve a new implementation plan, a fact that seemed to catch Luke Eggers off-guard. After consulting the statutes, Mr. Eggers admitted that indeed, without a unanimous vote, this plan would have to be sent to the state board for approval.

After the 2-1 vote, the audience began booing the Republican members.

The resolution to combine three Boone precincts with a combined registration of over 9,000 voters into a single mega-precinct ... More of the same: passed 2-1.

Moving New River 3's polling place from the National Guard Armory, which is central to the concentration of population in that precinct, to Mutton's Crossing, a building on Bamboo Road in the most unpopulated part of the precinct, drew this comment from Ms. Campbell: "This is damn stupid!" The Mutton's Crossing location also does not have room for the mandated 25-foot "buffer zone," making it impossible for candidates to meet the public and hand out literature.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post got one of the details of the new Early Voting Implementation Plan wrong, and that has now been corrected.