"When I Said North Carolina Wasn't a Democracy, People Called Me Crazy"

In December 2016, I wrote a column for the Raleigh News & Observer stating that North Carolina could no longer be classified as a democracy. It went viral and global. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. The majority of feedback was positive, but in some quarters, I was described as a queer-communist-anti-American, and received scores of visceral email and voice messages to that effect and worse. Campus security were concerned about the specificity of some of the death threats.

The column was based on an analysis of the crumbling machinery of democracy in my state, drawing on my expertise as a professor of comparative politics at the University of North Carolina. I noted that a neutral expert scoring of North Carolina’s electoral integrity had placed the state on a par with pseudo-democracies such as Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. Partisan gerrymandering and targeted voter suppression drove the score lower. Combined with that, the General Assembly had targeted the LGBTQ community for discrimination (you may remember the push to force transgender people to use the restroom for the sex listed on their birth certificate), and Republicans had sought to curtail executive powers after losing the governorship in the 2016 elections.

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The North Carolina GOP is not particularly interested in what the voters think because they don’t have to be: They have effective detached themselves from the electoral accountability that underpins democracy.

The most egregious example of this is exploding now. There is a wealth of evidence that Republicans in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District systematically—and with malicious forethought and planning—stole the election. A paid Republican operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, reportedly oversaw a team that fraudulently gathered absentee ballots, marked an unknown number for Harris and destroyed others. Once all votes were counted, Republican Mark Harris was 905 votes ahead (or four-tenths of a percentage point) over his Democratic opponent Dan McCready.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/08/north-carolina-9th-district-democracy-222853