It’s been less than a week since a mob of traitorous criminals, directly incited by the President of the United States, carried out one of the most despicable acts in American history. Happily, in the hours and days that have followed, there have been some encouraging signs that finally, at long last, several powerful conservative voices who have long tolerated and abetted Trumpism have had enough.
...election 2020
There’s been a great deal of introspection and handwringing by North Carolina progressives in recent weeks in the aftermath of the election. After having spent much of the summer and fall reveling in the notion that the state was poised to issue a strong, across-the-board repudiation of Trumpism on November 3, the final results were, on many fronts, a disappointment.
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It was a mob hit, pure and simple. An angry mob boss, Donald Trump, ordered the hit; two of his henchmen, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, carried it out. Without warning, without cause and without apparent guilt, the two U.S. senators stabbed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the back this week and left their fellow Republican to bleed, pretty much ending his political career.
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With President Donald Trump refusing to concede and many races still on a razor’s edge as record numbers of mail-in ballots are counted, the post-election period has been stressful for many Americans. But Kathy Manning, the Greensboro attorney and businesswoman who won the Sixth Congressional District race last week, is already thinking about next steps.
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Celebration and consternation greeted the weekend announcement that former Vice President Joe Biden had secured the electoral votes to become President of the United States. President Donald Trump has so far refused to concede and continues to baselessly insist there was widespread fraud and election irregularities.
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Absent reform, GOP will once again control redistricting of congressional and legislative maps State Democrats failed to win enough legislative districts Tuesday to have greater influence in shaping laws and in drawing new Congressional and House and Senate district boundaries next year. Instead of picking up seats in the state House, early results show that Democrats lost ground.
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Democrat Roy Cooper was reelected governor Tuesday, fighting back a challenge from Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest who made Cooper’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic a centerpiece of his campaign. In the end, voters rewarded Cooper’s steady leadership during the ongoing crisis while rejecting Forest’s call for a quicker reopening of businesses and schools.
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"Razor-thin" margins could decide some legislative races Before the polls open on Election Day, more than 4.5 million North Carolinians will have already voted early in person or by mail. It’s those results that county elections offices are expected to post within an hour after the polls close Tuesday night.
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As part of our ongoing effort to inform North Carolinians about the state judiciary, Policy Watch is publishing a series of Q&A’s with the candidates seeking statewide judicial office this fall. Each of the 16 candidates (six who are contesting three Supreme Court seats and ten who are contesting five seats on the Court of Appeals) was asked the same seven questions by former PW Courts, Law and Democracy Reporter Melissa Boughton.
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Even with an increase in absentee voting, election directors expect a large in-person turnout. Since March, when the COVID-19 pandemic began upending so many aspects of American life, elections directors across the state have worried about the impact on the November election.
Health concerns have led to an unprecedented number of absentee ballot requests. But a divisive presidential election and tumultuous political season could also lead to heavy in-person turnout. That’s a problem for the backbone of the election systems across the state: the more than 15,000 election workers, the majority of whom are older people for whom coronavirus infection is most dangerous. ...
Man who went by "James Fortune" was a gateway to network of far-right operatives Shortly after dawn on a recent steamy July morning, a man who said his name was James Fortune showed up off NC Highway 12 in Cape Hatteras. He had flown in from New York City and rented a car for a rendezvous with an employee of a North Carolina nonpartisan election education organization for a long day of deep-sea fishing.
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More than 10% of all registered voters in North Carolina have already requested an absentee ballot for the November election, according to the State Board of Elections, a 1,400% increase compared with the same time in the 2016 election cycle. And the number will certainly increase before the Oct. 27 deadline to request an absentee ballot. The uptick in requests is attributed to concerns about voting in-person during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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