The NC General Assembly created a new commission to develop the rules for how hydraulic drilling of natural gas (fracking) can proceed in North Carolina and it gave most the seats to the mining and energy industry. That’s bad enough, but it turns out Speaker Thom Tillis filled a seat reserved for an environmentalist with a Lee County man whose company is buying up mineral rights for exploration. A revealing video investigation by WRAL-TV captures just how sneaky the whole affair is – the investigative report begins less than a minute into a half-hour show on ethical conflicts at the new NC Mining and Energy Commission. The fracking industry has a disturbing record of being ethically challenged.

Mother Jones magazine has boiled the history of political money deals in the United States into a clever annotated timeline and a highly readable article, starring a host of shady characters in “a dramatic battle between the forces of reform and influence that goes back more than 250 years before the birth of the super-PAC.”

A Raleigh-based group called Voter Integrity Project is forcing election officials to spend hundreds of hours researching the status of voters the group claims are not alive or not citizens. VIP’s first mass action challenged the registrations of over 500 voters whose names matched people who indicated they were not citizens in their response to a summons to jury duty in Wake County. After extensive research, the state and county election boards have narrowed the list of possible problems to about 8 voters; many of the rest were not citizens at the time they were called to jury service but became naturalized citizens before they registered to vote. VIP is not satisfied; they’re appealing their claims to superior court. But, as reporter Scott Mooneyham indicates, the challenge shows that current registration procedures actually work well. (Meanwhile, a new law that Democracy NC helped pass will stop the Division of Motor Vehicles from including non-citizen legal residents in the lists it sends to clerks of court for potential jury duty, which will improve the integrity of those lists and save everyone time and money.) VIP has also challenged the registration of hundreds of voters it claims match the names of dead people in several counties, including Wake, Alamance, Halifax and Moore. There likely are names that should be removed, especially because of the time lag and other glitches in how election boards are notified about deaths – although nowhere near as many names as VIP claims. The group could play a better role if it took a cooperative approach with officials instead of pursuing a mission to damage the credibility of the election process as a prelude to pushing again for a harsh voter ID law.

Early Voting is very popular in North Carolina and the evidence shows it doesn’t inherently favor Democrats or Republicans (see reports here and here). But in the current hyper-partisan environment, disputes over the location and hours of Early Voting sites are too often turning into a power struggle instead of a rational discussion about sensible options. Sunday voting is becoming more controversial in this context, but the data show that Sunday afternoons are the most intensive hours of voting in nearly every county that has offered this option. People who work fixed schedules or who have limited access to transportation need opportunities to vote on weekends and evenings, and we need to offer them if we want North Carolina to climb out of its typical ranking among the bottom 15 states for voter turnout (2008 was the exception, thanks to Early Voting and Same-Day Registration). Most counties are finalizing their Early Voting plans this week or have already set the schedule. When the Democratic and Republican members of the local board of elections can’t agree, alternative plans are reviewed by the State Board of Elections, which has historically favored providing voters more opportunities. Will that perspective change if  Republicans gain the majority of seats on the State Board by virtue of winning the governorship?

A report released today reveals that North Carolina has 115,000 registered Latino voters or nearly 25,000 more than the official count at the State Board of Elections (which only began asking voters their ethnicity in 2002). That’s a 35% increase over the number in October 2008. In addition, the report says another 100,000 unregistered Latino citizens could be signed up to vote by November. The report by Democracy North Carolina and a trio of Latino organizations also describes key characteristics of the Latino electorate and strategies for engaging them in the political process. For example, it points out that 62% of Latino registered voters are ages 18-40, compared to 34% of white and 43% of black registered voters. No racial or ethnic group has a higher proportion of Unaffiliated voters (37%), which suggests that neither party should take the growing Latino vote for granted. The report pinpoints the counties with the most Hispanics, in absolute numbers and as a percent of the county’s population. Contrary to the stereotype of Hispanics being single men from Mexico who enter the US illegally and migrant from job to job, the report notes that 58% of the Latinos in North Carolina are citizens, 39% originate from a country other than Mexico, and 47% are women. A one-page version of the report is available for download here.

Here’s another report about the tiny number of über-fat cats bankrolling the Super PACs. The Washington Post reports: “Just 47 people account for more than half (57.1 percent) of the $230 million raised by super PACs from individual donors, according to the study by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) and Demos, two liberal research and advocacy organizations. Just over 1,000 donors giving $10,000 or more were responsible for 94 percent of the money raised.” The libertarian Cato Institute would be happy – let people do what they want with their money, no regulation needed. That may be a fine theory for an ivory tower elitist, but it doesn’t work too well in real life, for hamburgers or elections. Fueled by the greedy few, we’re now on our way to experience a record-shattering $5.8 billion federal election cycle, says the Center for Responsive Politics. You can hear the Cato Institute closer to home, at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. John Samples from Cato will join Press Millen, a more level-header soul and local attorney, in a discussion of the meaning and impact of the Citizens United decision as part of the bookstore’s town meeting series. The free event, no reservation needed, is August 13 at 7:30 PM.

Here are two NC stories of groups setting out to exert power – one taking the hard road of community organizing and grassroots democracy, the other using their big-money connections to buy an election. The first story describes how and why Stokes County neighbors came together to wage an impressive campaign against the prospect of natural gas fracking in the backyards. Many of them had won an earlier Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) fight and they knew the importance of persistence, facts, emotion, strategy, and public support. They eventually forced their all-Republican county commission to oppose fracking and then won over their conservative state legislator, who bucked his GOP leaders by voting to uphold Gov. Perdue’s veto of the fracking legislation – truly remarkable. There are many lessons in this story, down to the last part about the group’s new interest in local electoral politics. Meanwhile, the other story is about a new Super PAC setting out to pick the winner of the NC Supreme Court election for you. The group is led by the curious team of former state Republican chair Tom Fetzer (who was burned by a Democrat-backed independent group in the 2006 judicial election) and Democratic former Chief Justice Burley Mitchell. There are lessons in this story, too, plus this lingering question: Will the candidate benefiting from this Super PAC (Justice Paul Newby) publicly scold these powerbrokers for undermining a fair election?

Because the State Board of Elections is starved for funds, the public gets a poor view of how money flows into our elections: Who is giving and spending what for whose benefit? While other states have searchable databases of donors, the backlog for processing campaign disclosure reports in NC is measured in years. (See, for example, this Democracy NC report on the backlog.) The problem is even worse when it comes to tracking the millions spent on elections by outside groups that are supposedly not coordinated with a candidate. Thankfully, here comes the Institute for Southern Studies with what it calls “North Carolina’s first searchable database of election-year spending by independent groups in state races. . . . FollowNCMoney.org gathers all reports on TV ads, mailers and other independent expenditures by outside groups in North Carolina, and places them in an easy-to-use searchable and sortable database. Users can sort the information by the name of the group spending the money, the date of the expenditure, the political race where it appears and the affected candidate.” ISS emphasizes that the site is “a beta release,” undergoing revisions and updates “largely because of gaps and inconsistencies in government reports.” Check it out, play around with the data, turn in your feedback! Thanks ISS/Facing South!

It is now the last week of our internship and we are looking at all we have accomplished in the past two months. From voter registration drives and tabling at various events, to speaking engagements and meeting with our elected officials, it has all been such a learning experience. I have definitely learned a lot about state and local politics through my engagement. I’ve also learned how to better network and articulate my views on issues in a comprehensible way. Mostly, I’ve seen how difficult our field of work is, and how rewarding it can be.

Last week, Forsyth County’s turnout for the 2nd Primary runoff election was less than 2%, a discouraging number. After looking at the numbers, we realized that Granville County had a larger turnout than most. The 500 phone-calls that we made reminding people that there was a run-off election seemed to have made a difference. Those long hours of conversations with strangers on the phone seemed so much more worth the effort after seeing very clearly how our work impacted the turnout. Throughout my internship with Democracy NC, I have seen what our work can accomplish. Students often times feel as if they do not matter, but it is experiences like Democracy Summer that empower students to see their worth. The beginning of our last week with Linda Sutton began with this same conversation over a conference call with representatives from NC Campus Compact and NC PIRG. All of these organizations are working on increasing voter turnout amongst students, because it is clear that here is no limit to what students could accomplish for this democracy if engaged. Through my work with Democracy NC, I have seen my worth. I plan to continue to engage others students on my campus in our work—the work of democracy. This experience would have been nothing without the mentoring and love of Linda Sutton and the companionship of Tyshia Gray.

Keren Salim
Triad Team

Students at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication have created an interactive flow chart of the money in NC political campaigns with annotated descriptions of key terms. Visualize rivers of money. They’ve also just posted a series of articles about NC campaign finances on their WhichWayNC website and blog. Did you know that the two leading candidates for governor have already spent more than what an average North Carolinian would earn in 164 years? Another part of the website dissects and grades political advertisements: Good, bad and weird. Some parts of the website need updates, as well as fact-checking and corrections, but hey, nobody should think journalists are perfect. It’s a site that should become more useful as the fall semester and campaign season move into high gear.

Only 3.6% of registered North Carolina voters cast ballots in the runoff election on July 17. That’s about one-tenth of the already miserable turnout rate for the May primary – 34.7%.  FairVote’s analysis of the runoff notes that more North Carolinians believe in fairies and vampires than voted in July. The losers in the primary received far more votes than were cast in the runoff, indicating it’s a fairly useless tool for building party consensus behind a nominee.  FairVote also notes that editorial writers and NC organizations across the political spectrum think Instant Runoff Voting would be a viable alternative to the expensive, low-turnout method now used to pick a party’s nominee for positions like Commissioner of Insurance or Secretary of State.

The end of Democracy Summer also marks the beginning of our work. We return to our lives and respective campuses equipped with tools for organizing. There is no slowing down here in the triad only the shifting of gears. As meetings, events, tabling, and one-on-one’s count down the end this phase, pre-filled calendars in months to come read full steam ahead. Armed with new skills, we go forth to continue advocating and protecting our democracy by organizing students, creating citywide campus alliances, conducting a women’s assembly, candidate forums, interfaith organizations, passing city resolutions, and continue to engage, empower and build leadership throughout our community. The Democracy Summer experience has been one that has created a familial bond centered in our shared conviction ‘of, for, and by the people’. Besides, a democracy cannot exist without its people. A luta continua!

Tyshia Gray
Triad Team

Remember the mega-millions poured into making the healthcare debate in Congress so sickening? Well, the lobbying surrounding the 2012 Farm Bill has even more big-money spending from outfits that will make you gag. According to Think Progress, the new Farm Bill “would, among other things, deprive millions of Americans of food stamps, gut food safety protections, and prematurely force genetically engineered crops onto the market.” The fight in Congress is not over and the money keeps flowing. To get a sense of scale, an analysis by Food & Water Watch says that agribusinesses, commodity groups, food manufacturers and other special interests spent $173.5 million on the 2008 Farm Bill — more than $500,000 a day during the 110th Congress. By comparison, the lobbyists’ price tag for the Obama’s healthcare legislation hit $120 million.

Facing South this week includes a report from the Sentencing Project about the number of citizens in each state who are disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. North Carolina bars people who are serving a felony sentence from voting, but they automatically regain their voting rights as soon as they finish their sentence, including probation or parole. The chart shows 82,400 North Carolinians without voting rights because of a felony conviction. The number excluded soars to 341,800 in Tennessee, 451,500 in Virginia, and 1,541,600 in Florida because of those states’ harsher laws that withhold voting rights even after a person finishes his or her sentence. Democracy North Carolina recently held a press conference in Charlotte to spread awareness about the automatic restoration of voting rights in our state. One former felon featured in this TV report is now the mayor of Marshville, Franklin Deese. “I want my life to be a testament and an example for all people,” he says. “If this guy can go from being an inmate to now being the mayor, surely I can go from wherever I am to where I need to be.” More awareness of NC’s law is needed to overcome word on the street that once you’ve been locked up, you’re locked out of voting; the myth is not true, but it contributes to the large gender gap among voters in North Carolina. While women make up 53.5% of white voters in NC, they make up 58% of African-American voters! If black men registered at the same rate as black women, another 200,000 black men would be registered today, a 35% increase over the current 575,000 in the state.

We’re closing out our last full week as Democracy Summer interns this week. On the road a lot, recently — Kinston twice (last Thursday and this Tuesday), Goldsboro once, Greenville once. In Goldsboro last Thursday, we met Mayor Alfonzo King and a got a brief overview of city politics. Though unfortunately we were never able to do our planned voter registration drive in Goldsboro, it was worthwhile to get a fuller appreciation of the region.

After that, we jumped in the car and headed to Kinston to do some voter registration at the community health clinic downtown. Kinston was quite a lot of fun to see — quaint, charming. The health clinic traffic was slow but we did get a few folks registered (and updated a few already registered voters on when and where to vote in the runoff election.)

Friday was a slow day but Monday was busy. We got to the office early so as to be on time for an event with a community group in New Bern. Unfortunately, this ended up falling through, though as Jake pointed out, that has happened fairly rarely this summer. We still ended up making it to the Pitt County Board of Elections in Greenville, which was entertaining as well as edifying. Some Pitt Co. residents showed up and everyone got a chance to stump for increased voting sites and hours. It’s unclear what the final voting setup will be, but we’ll head back out to Greenville next week in order to be at the decision meeting.

Tuesday we were back out to Kinston for voter reg. Again, a slow but productive day. We had some more bad luck with another meeting, this one with Eastern Carolina Equality, being cancelled just as we were about to leave to Greenville from Kinston for it. We also continued to make calls reminding people to vote in the special election, as that Tuesday was Election Day. According to the data, it looks like the calls we made (and we made a lot in the week leading up to the election) did some good, so that’s something to rally around.

The rest of the week we’re doing some administrative work around the office and working on our ‘media hits’. Check out The Greenville Guardian, a free, independent newspaper, for some of our writing!

It’s been a long, fun, productive summer, and I’m taking time to reflect on what I’ve learned, both about organizing and myself. We’re gearing up for a busy final week!

Griffin Bur
Greenville team