North Carolina's chapter of the NAACP, under its inspiring leader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, has long been at the forefront of the fight for minority voting rights here in the Tarheel State, most recently by filing a lawsuit in federal courts seeking to overturn the state's (and Gov. McCrory's) worst-in-the-nation voter ID and voter suppression law, the Voter Information Verification Act. And so it should come as no surprise that NC-NAACP sprang into action as soon as it was alerted to this breaking story, rapidly coordinating with other voting rights organizations at both the state and national level to respond forcefully to these revelations. Those efforts resulted, on May 8th (just one day after the story broke here), in a coalition of groups including Demos, Project Vote, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Southern Coalition for Social Justice, with an able assist by Democracy NC, submitting a warning letter to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services informing them that North Carolina was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, and threatening the state with possible legal action.

The coalition's letter included a stunning summary of evidence its members have been collecting, via face-to-face interviews at state public assistance offices, since October of last year, documenting that 75% of visitors to state public assistance offices are never asked if they would like to register to vote (in violation of the National Voter Registration Act), as well as that many North Carolina public assistance offices don't even stock voter registration application forms - evidence which both validates and offers an explanation for the registration collapse I reported here at Daily Kos.

That letter, in turn, elevated the story's prominence to a level attracting the attention of mainstream media, and in just four days the number of reports published by the state's major newspapers and TV stations has become too great for me to track (but a partial list can be found here).

Next, just yesterday (four days following this story's initial publication) NC-NAACP's Rev. Barber and a small army of civil rights attorneys appeared at Gov. McCrory's office in Raleigh and presented the governor's assistant with a dossier summarizing all of the evidence that has emerged to date, plus a sweeping public records request for all paper and electronic records related to National Voter Rights Act compliance. Following that submission Rev. Barber, NAACP's Al McSurely, and Democracy NC's Bob Hall held an 'emergency news conference' outside Gov. McCrory's office, outlining the story and NC-NAACP's response (including a possible request for an investigation by the U.S. Dept. of Justice). I was there, merely as a Gumpish witness to history. It was awe-inspiring, and believe me: these folks are as serious as a heart attack:





Events continue to evolve rapidly in this story, and new revelations keep coming. Just last night, Raleigh's WRAL TV reported the initial results of its own public records request in this matter:

When a group of voting rights advocates notified the state Department of Health and Human Services recently that North Carolina may not be living up to federal requirements that social services agencies help their clients register to vote, a spokeswoman indicated the department was surprised [....] That profession of surprise is a much different response than WRAL News received from the North Carolina State Board of Elections on Friday, where officials indicated that they were not only aware of the problem but said they had been prodding DHHS for years to address the issue. In response to a public records request by WRAL News, the State Board of Elections provided more than 60 emails and calendar entries dating to 2012 indicating there have been meetings and emails exchanged between DHHS' Division of Social Services and elections officials that focused on the problem.

WRAL News asked Lefebvre and DHHS Communications Director Kendra Gerlach to clarify the Friday statement. After 8 p.m. Monday, Gerlach responded that NC FAST makes links to voter registration available from its home screen.

That latter weak-kneed defense by DHHS - that it's new online public assistance application site, NC FAST, includes a link to a voter registration page - won't make this problem go away for McCrory. Poverty-level citizens are well-understood to have much more limited access to the internet than do other citizens, and the National Voter Registration Act specifically requires that public assistance agencies provide paper voter registration applications, and prescribes specific speech public assistance personnel must use to ask if applicants wish to register - requirements which have now been documented to have been ignored by the state Department of Health and Human Services for at least two years now.

Next up: look for Gov. McCrory to throw his Secretary of Health and Human Services, the controversial Dr. Aldona Wos, under the bus.

Please keep tweeting and FB-sharing this story. Your efforts are what is burning this important story into the public's awareness, and driving the legal efforts forward....together (not one step back!)

