The encouraging backlash to Boliek's voter suppression

North Carolina Republicans are working with relentless determination to suppress unfriendly votes. In counties across the state, GOP-appointed election overseers are closing polling places on college campuses and voting to prevent Black people from voting after church on Sundays. The campaign hasn’t been as flashy and provocative as NCGOP voter suppression once tended to be. By now they have accumulated enough practice to force voters from the polling places with stern, remorseless hands.

Dave Boliek is the chief executor of the Republican Party’s plans. Rarely one for subtlety, Boliek has been frank and direct in his role as the GOP’s principal anti-voting enforcer. He’s hired ultra-partisans and offered minimal rationalization for their presence on his staff. He’s expanded the phalanx of operatives at his disposal and unabashedly put them to work suppressing Democratic voters. Boliek is no longer the state’s smiling accountant. He’s the democracy-killer.

It’s ugly, if typical, that North Carolina is facing another round of democratic erosion. But as the situation has played out, I’ve begun to find myself feeling unexpectedly encouraged. That’s because the GOP has faced stern opprobrium from the state’s chattering class and opposition from Democrats and advocates. Voter suppression is the norm in North Carolina government. It has not yet become an accepted part of our political culture.

Democracy’s resilience in North Carolina is a bit surprising. Much of our state’s legacy media has long since made peace with the regime and began to offer weak, nonjudgmental coverage of GOP governance, even when Republicans violated important democratic norms. When Boliek and his enforcers began this latest round of voter suppression, it appeared that the state’s response might be dangerously muted. No longer. Boliek’s attacks on young people, Black people, and other inconvenient obstacles to his party’s complete dominance have aroused expressions of outrage from many corners in our state. Justice Brandeis’s dictum about the cleansing effect of government transparency is evident in North Carolina.

The stout resistance to Republican authoritarianism has a notable, and heartening, implication for our state’s political culture. It shows that our democratic birthright is strong. This is not obviously what one would expect from the historical trends that shaped our government. For much of the state’s history white people have exercised strict control over the levers of power and, more often than not, forcibly excluded African Americans. If democracy is “in our DNA,” its influence has been blunted by white supremacy. And yet we have had a prickly, outraged response to Boliek’s efforts to preempt any electoral backlash against his regime. The embers of self-government have long burned faintly in this Southern state, but the fire has not gone out.

Subscribe to Alexander H. Jones substack blog here