THE elderly man with a ponytail and walking stick was voting for Donald Trump—“he knows what to do with the money”—but he wasn’t happy. “It’s a sin to judge people,” he said at a polling station in Durham, North Carolina; yet the candidates had spent so much time disparaging one another. “It should be against the law to talk about each other,” he reckoned. This year’s television commercials, agreed his companion, had been the most dispiriting ever.
Particular attention falls on North Carolina today. First, because of long-running anxiety about race-based disenfranchisement, mostly but not wholly alleviated by a court ruling that found restrictions imposed by the Republican-controlled legislature had targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision”. Even after those were squashed, the NAACP and others have raised concerns about the paucity of early voting opportunities in some counties and the dubious purging of voter rolls. Somewhat obtusely, the state Republican Party put out a crowing statement that mentioned the decline of early voting among black North Carolinians compared with 2012. Then there were the worries about possible intimidation by...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2eATz1H
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