WHO'S GUARDING THE HEN HOUSE?

The recently decided, agonizingly long governor’s race has finally been settled in North Carolina and the state belatedly ushers in Roy Cooper, embattled before his term begins. Many observers wondered if the McCrory campaign was going to steal the election by having it "contested" and thrown into the NC statehouse for resolution, where a GOP majority would have certainly made him its choice. There may have been a movement towards that inside the McCrory camp, but we will never know. However, we must not lose sight of what the state GOP, including the governor, members of the legislature, and conservative, big money interest groups was trying to accomplish all along: delegitimize voting for a significant portion of African-American voters.

One of the most powerful weapons used by McCrory and his allies--hand-picked for the job by him--sits on the State Board of Elections itself, Rhonda Amoroso. Appointed to ostensibly ensure fair and free elections that adhere rigidly to the rule of law, Amoroso instead took an aggressively partisan stance, entertaining all sorts of claims of fraud that in the end were utterly and completely debunked. The very person who is supposed to act as an impartial judge in matters of elections actively took one side, by repeatedly interjecting rumors of voter fraud in example after example, dragging the hearings out for weeks. The foul mood of suspicion in the system that festers in many voters across the state was encouraged so that the state GOP leaders will have a pretense to continue to attack voting rights in any way they can. This was never about winning. McCrory was the sacrificial lamb who is expendable: the GOP has a super-majority and can make law as it wishes. Even as the election was being contested, Art Pope's Civitas Institute was already suing to challenge same-day voting, a popular practice that encourages underrepresented populations to vote: the poor and the young, primarily, groups that tend, of course, to vote Democratic.

In the end, McCrory's legal team looked unprepared and mean-spirited as they cynically combed every county in the state looking for technicalities under which they could challenge votes, sometimes by exaggerating charges that were later disproved, such as a number of so-called ineligible felons who turned out to have misdemeanors. In some cases, they relied on pure rumor, including a wildly false claim made by Amoroso that there was widespread fraud in Durham County. Keep in mind that most of the other challenges were for relatively small numbers of votes, often in the hundreds. Here was a sitting board member, speaking at a public meeting casting doubt on thousands of votes, without a shred of evidence, in a county that went for Cooper by a 4 to 1 ratio. It does not get more overtly partisan than that. The proceedings came to a sordid end on the last day of hearings when an inconsequential amount of votes in rural Bladen County were contested by what it turns out to have been a past-felon who was so muddled in what he was even doing that he took the fifth at a hearing that was to settle his protest! Clearly, GOP lawyers had just set this guy up to bring forward one in what was just a long string of bogus claims across the state.

As we look at the national stage, we can see the Trump administration advocating the same attack on voting rights that we see in our state. Trump baselessly claimed just a few days after the election that “millions” of people voted fraudulently. Broadly, Trump’s advisors are part of a campaign to defund, defang, and delegitimize government institutions that work to advocate for the protection of our rights, resources, and laws. Rhonda Amoroso’s appointment is a microcosm of national event. Everywhere we look, political and business actors who have been in direct opposition to any regulation that would curtail their pursuit of profit have been appointed to the very agencies that are supposed to safeguard the populace against the abuses and excesses of corporate oligarchy. Jeff Sessions, who has spent his entire career going after voting rights workers and who called the 1965 Voting Rights Act a “piece of frivolous legislation” is now entrusted with enforcing those very laws. Betsy DeVos, a billionaire whose decades-long crusade against public schools is her claim to fame, is now in charge of those very schools. An avowed climate change denier and oilman is in charge of protecting our nation’s environment.

Donald J. Trump may have no ideological core, but he has allowed the proponents of an extreme form of anti-government ideology to call the shots. Coordinated attacks on North Carolina elections are just one play out of the carefully planned playbook of a billionaire class of Americans who run secretive groups such as the Koch Brothers’ ALEC, and at home, the Civitas Institute. Often funded by the money derived from polluting industries--don’t forget that McCrory is a former Duke Energy executive--these groups are using big bucks to stealthily force their extreme views on the rest of us. When the institutions of government that the people, through laws, have enacted in order to protect the rights of the poor and voiceless, the education of children, and the sustainability of the planet are put in the hands of a tiny, rabidly self-interested few, the wolf is indeed guarding the hen house.