Bill Aceto Skates, But the Ice Proves Thin

All things considered, it was not a good night for Watauga BOE Chair Bill Aceto. It was a surprisingly bad night for Watauga County Attorney Four Eggers (who wasn't even there but who got talked about bigly). It was an out-and-out disaster of a night for the other Watauga BOE member, Nancy Owen, who also wasn't there and about which, see below).

Aceto had earlier -- you'll recall, perhaps -- based his whole blueprint of inaction on Mr. Eggers' legal memorandum that the state BOE had no authority to set an early voting plan for Watauga, once the local board had failed to do its job.  Eggers Aceto subsequently wrote his memo to the state saying a single early voting location at the local BOE offices would be "adequate," in his opinion. He was in a legal sense defaulting. He was also in a practical sense skating over a pit.

Aceto continued to skate right up until Wednesday of this week, just hours before the SBOE was scheduled to meet to determine Watauga's fate, along with 32 other counties. By Wednesday, he had discovered conclusively that indeed the state BOE intended to treat Watauga like any of the other 99 counties in North Carolina and not as some special case exempted via a "lack of jurisdiction" claim.

Democrat Stella Anderson had submitted her plan by the deadline, backed up with charts and graphs of data dealing with (the required-by-statute) demographic, geographic, and partisan data . With the deadline for submission gone by, up pops Aceto scant hours before the hearing was set with an email saying he wanted his plan considered after all. (Apparently, deadlines are wholly porous if you're the Local Republican In Charge.) So Aceto skated on down to Raleigh yesterday, confident.

First thing that happened, Four Eggers' now famous "jurisdictional" argument simply evaporated. Poof. The only people who raised it were a couple of attorneys there to argue the law if necessary, but it was never necessary. Bill Aceto is not -- truth be told -- good on his feet, and without Four Eggers there to tell him what to say....

It was never in doubt: The state BOE can decide our fate, and they did.

(I sat directly behind a small gaggle of lawyers, none of whom I'd ever seen or met. They were buzzing at the beginning of the Watauga case about Four Eggers' legal memo. One turned around to me: "What happened to the whole 'you don't have jurisdiction' argument?" I shrugged. Did he know I had written about the Eggers' legal memorandum?)

Deciding Watauga's Voting Fate
The Republican board members came to the table already determined to give Aceto what he wanted, which was fewer hours than the Anderson proposal and a site at Legends rather than the Student Union, and they were very willing to throw Aceto numerous life-lines. (There'll be a subsequent post here, with color commentary, on those sterling SBOE public servants and their collective and individual behavior in the marathon meeting yesterday.)

The real sticking point last night was Chancellor Sheri Everts' refusal to surrender Legends for early voting. (It's unsuitable in many respects, which Anderson had clearly and thoroughly outlined in her submission, and is a revenue-producing venue for bands and dancing.) Anderson had submitted Everts' letter of denial to the SBOE, with ASU General Counsel Dayton Cole's covering letter saying "this is a negative response to your request," but Republican SBOE member James Baker just couldn't get past the fact that he couldn't find the exact words, "Get the hell outta here about using Legends!" in Everts' letter, so he muled and hemmed around like some sit-com character: "What is the Chancellor saying? Oh, my! I don't know! What does it all mean?" (That Baker is a source of barely concealed embarrassment, even to his fellow Republicans, is palpable.)

Republican board member Rhonda Amoroso began to cheer-lead for Legends. She volunteered that she had once driven past the place, and it looked fine to her. "I couldn't find the Student Union," she added, which she intended as a major indictment of its suitability.

"Six thousand voters did find it just fine last March," I shouted from the back of the room. Well, I didn't actually, but I came damn close. (Having waited in that fetid cattle car of a meeting room for over ten hours for the Watauga case to be called, I didn't want to be thrown out at the moment of truth. So, yes, I chickened out.) The Board members, some of whom claimed they were all about "the data," had either never looked at the early voting statistics in Watauga (provided by Anderson), or, if they had ... meh, data schmatter.

Republican SBOE Chair A. Grant Whitney, the Blutto of the Republicans, growing more and more impatient with the whole Watauga drama and seeing no way he could put the knife in Anderson's chest and get away with it, suggested the "compromise" that Mr. Baker put into the form of the motion that passed 3-2 (with the two Democratic members voting no):

“Move that we adopt the plan I will refer to as the Bill Aceto Plan with the following caveats: if the Chairman of the Watauga County Board of Elections cannot secure in writing from the Chancellor, or Counsel to the Chancellor, permission by the Appalachian State University to use the Legends site within five calendar days [making the deadline Tuesday, Sept. 13, 5 p.m.], then Plemmons Student Union will automatically be used. Further: If permission cannot be obtained from ASU within 5 days -- written permission by the Chancellor, or Counsel to the Chancellor, to the Chairman of the Watauga County Board of Elections -- then Plemmons Student Union will be substituted in all places where the Aceto Plan calls for ASU Legends.”

I believe -- and other people heard him say it -- that Aceto commented that the motion put him in an impossible position. Other people in the room said they heard very clearly the cracking of ice.

So now Bill Aceto and Four Eggers, who up until last night have willfully disrespected and/or ignored Chancellor Everts, and whatever NC GOP goon squad Eggers can recruit for the job, will all now until next Tuesday be assaulting the Chancellor, urging her to give in, give up, surrender on the issue of Legends. Next Tuesday at 5 p.m. is zero hour, when perhaps hell freezes over at last.

What Was Bad Last Night for Four Eggers?
Bill Aceto was forced by Democratic SBOE member Joshua Malcolm to admit that he had gotten Four Eggers to write read and approve his plan before submitting it, further evidence -- as though we needed it -- that Four Eggers is the be-all and end-all of ballot-access in Watauga County, while also serving the Republican majority on the County Board of Commissioners. He has been in my opinion operating for years with a clear and persistent conflict of interest.

The main issue in the November elections -- so far as the County Commission is concerned -- is ending the corrupt accretion of power in county government of the Eggers Eggers Eggers & Eggers law firm.

What Was Terrible for Nancy Owen Last Night
Nancy Owen, Bill Aceto's fellow Republican on the Watauga BOE, is justifiably notorious now for failing to second Aceto's early voting plan at the August 15 meeting of the board. Back last July I had described her as a "mute stump," which was just mean. She failed to show up for the mandatory state Board of Elections two-day training sessions last month (or was it July?), and she failed to show up in Raleigh yesterday. The only time the SBOE has  actually experienced her existence was when she was forced to be on the February 10 teleconference with the SBOE (over the March primary early voting plan) because Aceto was missing, and someone had to answer questions about the "majority" Republican plan. She embarrassed herself. Or rather Eggers-Aceto set her up for embarrassment. She couldn't answer questions. She didn't understand anything about the Judge Stephens order. She'd been kept in the dark.

Last night, SBOE Chair Whitney suddenly asked Aceto, "Would you tell me where the third member of your board is? I would like to know who that member is and why she isn't here. And why she didn't second your early voting plan in August." Whoa!

Not having shown her face at the SBOE up until now, I believe Nancy Owen might not ever want to show her face at the SBOE.

Other Super Bad Moments for Bill Aceto
Bill Aceto had some papers in his hand which he waved at the board members in his attempt to convince them that there has been major election law violations -- outrageous electioneering -- committed at the ASU Student Union in the past. Stella Anderson had pointed out that no electioneering reports had ever been filed with the local BOE because of the Student Union. Aceto: "Here are some!" and he passed up his pieces of paper ... which turned out to be hair-on-fire accusations written up by Watauga Co. GOP Chair Anne Marie Yates and her daughter about supposedly terrible things they had supposedly witnessed, and which they sent not to the BOE as an official report but to the NC GOP as partisan buffalo dust.

SBOE member Malcolm listened to Aceto and leveled on him: "I do not believe you, sir. I do not believe that there were violations of state law going on." Whoa! again.

Before that moment Malcolm had questioned Aceto closely on exactly how he had "negotiated" with Chancellor Everts for the Legends site. "Is it true, sir, that in your letter to the Chancellor, you warned her that she was not to even consider the Student Union as a possible site for early voting." Why, yes, Aceto admitted, so Malcolm evaluated his negotiating skills: Why would you do that? Malcolm asked, appending a condemnatory "Sir?" to the question. Why would you open supposedly good-faith negotiation by announcing that you would not even consider one viable option?

Why indeed?


Here is the link to the Watauga Case video posted by WRAL: "State board sets early voting schedules, Part 2." The Watauga case begins at 4:55 and is fraught with bad sound and the occasional glitch.

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.

Monitoring Non-Existent "Voter Fraud" Demands Less Voting

The Watauga Republican duo of
Owen and Aceto

Unlike the Republican duo on the Watauga County Board of Elections, the Lenoir County Republican duo actually voted to reduce all early voting in that county to a single site in downtown Kinston, open only during weekday business hours and on the Saturday morning before the election. They cut the total hours of early voting to less than a quarter of the 443 early voting hours Lenoir County had in 2012.

They voted 2-1 on that "plan," which is also being appealed to the State Board of Elections (SBOE)  tomorrow (along with Watauga's "minority plan" submitted by Stella Anderson). They voted. Watauga's Republicans Aceto and Owen did not vote, but they're trying to achieve the same thing in Watauga: a single downtown early voting location, with the minimum number of hours.

The Lenoir County Republicans wrote a letter to the SBOE piously rationalizing their decision-making: the single site, they wrote, would allow poll workers to “monitor voter fraud more effectively” (NewsObserver).

This is the meme that Republicans, from the Cheeto Jesus Himself down to your local Republican apparatchik, have adopted this year: We're not "voters" to them; we're all potential fraudsters just waiting for the main chance to cheat.

But who's cheating?  The lone Democrat on the Lenoir County BOE told the SBOE in a letter that his GOP counterparts were following the directive from the N.C. Republican Party to reduce early voting: “One of my fellow board members informed me that the two Republican members of the board had been given an agenda from the North Carolina Republican Party that he felt bound to follow, and he hoped I would not take offense at the position he intended to take to comply with that agenda,” Patterson wrote.

He was referring, O my brethren, to the now infamous memo written by NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse, ordering Republican members of boards of elections to strangle early voting and blame potential "fraud."

The evil they claim to see is in their own hearts. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Google the phrase. You'll learn something.

Politics 101: Don't Pick a Fight With the Press

Stephen Kidd

Longish article in the Salisbury Post on current political campaigning in Rowan County (which is east of Eden), with the local Democratic Party energized and the local Republican Party throwing a snit-fit over press coverage in the Salisbury Post:

"Local Republicans ... refused to speak with the Salisbury Post about efforts to prepare for November’s election. Rowan Republican Chairman Stephen Kidd cited disagreements with past Salisbury Post stories. Other local Republicans didn’t return requests for comment or directed inquiries to Kidd."

BWA-ha-ha!

The Rowan County Republican Party has been riven by Tea Party v. Establishment bitterness, and the Salisbury Post has reported on that. Maybe that made Stephen Kidd sore. More likely, it was the Salisbury Post's coverage of the notorious (but blessedly short) tenure of one Mac Butner as Republican Chair of the Rowan County Board of Elections that got under Stephen Kidd's thin skin.

Stephen Kidd was responsible for getting Mac Butner appointed to the Rowan County Board of Elections in 2015. Within minutes, it seemed, Butner's history of flamboyantly racist posts on Facebook made national news, and in an unprecedented move, the Republican NC State Board of Elections removed Butner from office. The SBOE determined Butner's appointment had been "a clerical error." All of that made it into the Salisbury Post.

Mac Butner died suddenly last month, and the Salisbury Post published a lengthy profile of his political career and did not shy away from his controversial last years. That could not have pleased Stephen Kidd.

And so he's decided to feud, in a very Trumpian way, with the Salisbury Post and thus add to a growing impression that the Rowan Republican Party has much to be defensive about.

Wake County GOP Trying to Rally Republicans Against More Early Voting

Gosh. It's almost as though Early Voting revealed a character flaw in those voters who take advantage of it. According to the Wake County Republican Party, Early Voting is part of the moral decay of this nation.

The Wake GOP sent out a screaming email (lots of RED type) urging their loyal members to send comments to the NC State Board of Elections opposing more Early Voting. What were their excellent reasons?

1. The Democrat request will greatly increase the cost to taxpayers.
2. It has been proven that additional days and locations do NOT increase the number of voters who vote early.
3. This only creates additional opportunity for chaos.

I'm sort of surprised that the Watauga County tag-team of Eggers-Aceto haven't trotted out that first one, since their kind of Republican always knows the cost of everything (and the value of nothing).

The 2nd reason defies statistics (not to mention gravity). The popularity of Early Voting has steadily grown. That's a fact. It's expected to grow even more this fall. That's why the Executive Director of the State Board of Elections cautioned all the county boards to expect up to 56% of all votes this fall to be cast early.

But our favorite reason -- and cue the dark music of moral turpitude -- is the third. The "opportunity for chaos." By chaos, they mean "fraud," you bet! but they also mean the swirling of ungroomed and unwashed and unruly opinions that do not follow the neat channels of conservative dogma. All those people voting has always scared the high-caste Republican.

Little Watauga, Running With the Big Dogs

Hattip to Gerry Cohen, who keeps up with this stuff:

New voter registrations in various NC counties the past month (generally Aug 3 - Sept 2)

Wake 11,236
D 30.1%
L 1.0%
R 15.8%
U 53.2%

Orange 3,442
D 36.3%
L 1.1%
R 8.1%
U 54.5%

Durham 3,508
D 45.8%
L 0.6%
R 8.4%
U 45.3%

Mecklenburg 7,690
D 41.0%
L 1.3%
R 17.1%
U 40.5%

Buncombe 1,984
D 35.1%
L 1.8%
R 13.6%
U 49.5%

Guilford 3,532
D 40.4%
L 1.1%
R 14.1%
U 44.4%

Forsyth 2,383
D 39.2%
L 1.1%
R 17.1%
U 42.6%

Watauga 2,363
D 24.7%
L 2.1%
R 21.6%
U 51.5%

State Board of Elections Will Hear Watauga Case Next Thursday

Some take-aways from the media report below on the attempt by some 34 NC county boards of elections to make an end-run around the Fourth Circuit Court by limiting Early Voting this November:

1. Watauga County is one of only two counties whose BOE didn't even hold a vote on Early Voting plans.

2. Because of that, the Early Voting cases for Watauga and Cumberland will go first before the State Board of Elections, who will determine whether Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") is right in his scheme that the SBOE has no jurisdiction to set an Early Voting plan for a county that didn't adopt a plan.

3. That crucial meeting of the State Board of Elections will take place next Thursday, September 8, at the SBOE offices in Raleigh (441 North Harrington St, Raleigh, NC 27603). No doubt, the Watauga case will come up in the morning session.

[According to Talking Points Memo:] To make the state of play even more complicated, the election boards in two of the 34 counties whose plans are in question never even took a vote and it’s unclear whether the state board has jurisdiction to implement a new plan. If not, the early voting protocols would default to early voting during only weekday business houses along with one Saturday morning, and offered solely at the county elections office. 

“Which, in these two counties, Watauga and Cumberland, that would catastrophic,” Riggs said. Watauga is home to Appalachian State University, while Cumberland includes a military base and Fayetteville, one of North Carolina’s largest cities. Overall, 56 percent of North Carolina voters used early voting in 2012.

The State Board will hold hearings next Thursday on each of the disputed county plans.
“I think the State Board of Elections is unrealistic right now in thinking that they're going to get 34 of these heard in one day. I’ve seen three of them take two hours,” Riggs said.

Joshua Lawson, the general counsel for the State Board of Elections confirmed the scheduled hearing for the 34 county plans, including for the two counties where part of the discussion will be whether the state has jurisdiction. Asked about the concerns raised about the lack of early voting opportunities in some counties, Lawson said the state board will make a "data based decision” regarding each dispute.

ValuCity (c)

"I only want to admit people who share our values and love our people."

--Donald J. Trump, August 31, 2016

"Love our people," absolutely, especially in the spirit of the Christian love celebrated in the First Letter to the Corinthians  ("If I have not charity, I am nothing").

But "share our values"? Who exactly belongs to that our?

Did he mean my?

Like ... the value of self-centeredness? The value of braggadocio? The value of ostentatious display, of overweening pride, of nasty prejudices and hateful sayings?

Do I see an ounce of charity in Mr. Trump? No, I do not.

1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 

2 And though I have the gift of prophecy,and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains,and have not charity, I am nothing. 

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. 

4Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 

5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 

6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth.

"It is not clear how many clowns were inside the vehicle"

Members of the North Carolina General Assembly now terrorizing children and adults in Greenville County, South Carolina?