Today, the news that a federal court has declared North Carolina’s voter suppression laws discriminatory will spread across the internet and mainstream media. One aspect of the story that you probably won’t hear is that one of our own, DocDawg, helped bring today about. But it is a story you should know because it shows that each of us, in our own way, has the power to make a profound difference.
DocDawg is a private citizen who, like many of us, has been dismayed by what has happened since Tea Party Republicans won top to bottom control of the North Carolina legislature in 2012. Getting more and more involved in the progressive movement here in the South, in early 2015, he attended a DKos meetup a few hours away from his home in the central part of the state. I wasn’t there but my understanding is that the meeting featured Dr. William F. "Fergie" Reid of 90For90 as a speaker and talked a lot about the most restrictive voting laws to appear in the South since Jim Crow.
One thing to know about these laws is that they are a multi-layered attack on enfranchisement from a variety of different angles. Voter ID requirements get a lot of attention and so do gerrymandered districts. What hasn’t gotten as much attention is how North Carolina shifted and cut polling locations across the state. And that was the part that got Doc’s imagination running.
Doc is a scientist. He thinks in terms of data and facts. At some point, probably on the long drive home, he got the idea that while people were largely talking in theory about how limiting polling places would disenfranchise black voters in the state, the data was there to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. All that was needed was for someone to analyze it.
So he called some friends who are experts at this and convinced them to give their time (a lot of it) and talents. And then they set about analyzing everything they could get their hands on. They mapped polling locations before the laws were passed and after the laws were passed against the demographic information of every registered voter in North Carolina. What they found was stunning. It was also irrefutable.
Between the 2012 and 2014 elections the total number of Early Voting sites operated by North Carolina county boards of elections, statewide, increased modestly: from 363 to 366. But that same period witnessed substantial changes in those sites' locations. According to Voting Information Project data, 114 sites operating in November 2012 were no longer open in November 2014, replaced by 117 different sites. The impact on the average voter (across all races) was fairly insignificant: an increase from about 3.5 miles in 2012 to 3.6 miles in 2014 — a difference of only about 300 feet (roughly one city block).
But a look at the aggregate impacts by race reveals a startlingly different picture (Figure 1, below). While the average white voter's distance to his or her nearest Early Voting site increased by just 26 feet in 2014, the average black voter's distance increased by a quarter of a mile. Summing that up over the members of each race, that's an aggregate increase in distance-to-poll of just 21,000 miles for white voters (71% of the electorate), but more than 350,000 miles for black voters (22% of the electorate). That latter distance is the equivalent of a trip from the Earth to the Moon, and half way home again.
The numbers showed that North Carolina had systematically made it harder for black voters to participate in the electoral process. It wasn’t opinion and it wasn’t theory. It was cold hard fact.
Doc turned his findings over to the NC-NAACP and they became an important part of the legal case against the state’s regressive voter suppression laws. Laws that a federal court just ruled were discriminatory.
So, to my friend DocDawg, I say ‘congratulations’. You are an incredible example of what can happen when people who care join the fight against repression.
Forward together. Not one step back.
If you want to read more about what Doc and friends discovered when they analysed the data beyond the extract above, you can do so here. And if you want to learn about how this one act of activism was transformed into an organization dedicated to using data to fight for justice, make sure to click on the “About Us” page when you are done!