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Lack of early voting riles up N.C. campus already split by partisan gerrymander
North Carolina A&T State University has long been a focus in the state's seemingly perpetual dispute over gerrymandering. Now, students are fighting for an opportunity to vote easily in a potentially crucial presidential primary.
The campus of the country's largest historically black college has been cleaved in half by Republican mapmakers, split for 2016 and 2018 between two lopsidedly Republican congressional districts so as to minimize the impact of votes from the overwhelmingly Democratic student body of 12,000.
A lawsuit challenging that House district map as violating the rights of Democrats to fair elections and free speech under the state constitution, filed last week, cites the dividing of the A&T electorate as one of the most egregious examples of this partisan gerrymandering method, known as "cracking."
While that suit plays out, students have turned their attention to March 3. That's when Democrats in North Carolina and 16 other states will cast votes on a Super Tuesday that could reshape, or perhaps effectively decide, the presidential nominating contest.
Turns out, that's also the Tuesday in the middle of A&T's spring break week.
And, if the past is a guide, there will be no early voting location on campus so students can cast their ballots before vacation. That is why a group has launched an online petition drive to get the city of Greensboro or the Guilford County Board of Elections to stand up such a polling station.
More than 1,500 have signed the petition so far, spurred on by a "#LetAggiesVote" campaign on social media.
"I feel like letting Aggies vote should be the bare minimum," Cole Riley, a sophomore political science major organizing the effort, told the campus newspaper. "That's just how America is supposed to work. A movement asking us to vote ... we shouldn't need a movement in the first place."
- Partisan gerrymander landmark: N.C. court says state districts ... ›
- Eric Holder's group takes new aim at North Carolina map - The ... ›
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Ballot measures are good democracy — but only if you can understand them
Marginal improvements have been made to help voters understand the questions posed to them on the ballot this November, a new study concludes, but such ballot measures still favor the college-educated — who represent a minority of the U.S. population.
This year voters in eight states will decide the fate of a collective 36 such propositions. In a study released Thursday, Ballotpedia assessed how easy it is to comprehend what each proposal would accomplish, concluding that the difficulty level had decreased compared with the referendums decided in the last off-year election of 2017 — but not by much.
In fact, according to a pair of well-established tests, 21 of the 36 ballot measures cannot be understood by the 40 percent of the voting-age population who never attended college.
Two states asking Supreme Court for permission to regulate Electoral College conduct
Colorado has become the second state to ask the Supreme Court to decide if states may legally bind their presidential electors to vote for the candidate who carried their state.
The issue of so-called faithless electors is the latest aspect of an increasingly heated debate about the virtues and flaws of the Electoral College that has blossomed, especially among progressive democracy reform advocates, now that two of the past five presidential winners (Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000) got to the Oval Office despite losing the national popular vote.