Repeat after me: North Carolina is in play.
North Carolina is a voter-suppressed state, and BIPOC Youth are going to make a difference. We’ll find in just a month or more, but they may make not just “a difference”, but THE DIFFERENCE.
Ballot Curing in North Carolina
Our partners in North Carolina (NC Black Alliance and NCAAT in Action) have, with our help, flooded North Carolina campuses with canvassers and “ambassadors” to register, educate, and turn out the newly-energized BIPOC youth vote. With their other in-state partners, they’re working together to avoid duplication of effort. This fundraiser will also continue to support this effort.
But mostly with this effort we are helping with Election Protection in NC.
Our NC partners predict that there will be 150,000 ballots in November that need “curing” to correct minor things that must be fixed in order for a person’s vote to count. Not a typo: 150,000 ballots!
There is so much work to be done post-election in order for people’s votes to count: identify, contact, and assist voters whose ballots are challenged as deficient by the Republican voter-suppression juggernaut.
Here’s an NPR article explaining “ballot curing.
In an election likely to have razor-thin margins, these challenged votes could change the outcome!
We’ll have separate thermometers for NC Black Alliance and NCAAT in Action.
Key Candidates in North Carolina
There is a lot of money sloshing around in North Carolina. So we asked our NC partners for a short list of candidates who could really use our money and whose election would make a difference in the lives of North Carolinians and protect the state from its corrupt and overreaching Republican party. They had one question for us: Candidates at what level? My answer was “any level; we want to support the most strategic races.” Based on their recommendation, it clear that their focus was on the courts.
Allison Riggs – NC State Supreme Court Justice (KEEP)
The seven-justice NC Supreme Court has a 5-2 Republican majority. The MAGA court threw out a voting rights case and allowed the legislature free reign to gerrymander the state. Justice Riggs is a social justice attorney who was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper, and is up for partisan reelection against a Republican challenger who ruled that life begins at conception while on the Court of Appeal. More about Judge Riggs here.
Carolyn Thompson – NC Court of Appeals (KEEP)
Incumbent Judge Thompson is also up for partisan re-election. She is African-American and focused on victims of domestic violence while in private practice. As a state legislator, her opponent, Thomas Murry, tried to exempt NC from the ACA and pushed draconian voter ID laws. More on Judge Thompson here.
Raymond Smith – Challenger, State Senate (FLIP!)
Raymond Smith is an African American Gulf War veteran and former NC state Assembly member. Smith was drawn out of his district (total coincidence, I’m sure!) so he is running to flip a Senate seat in the Goldsboro area and shatter the Republican super-majority. Let’s hope the Republican power move backfires on them. His opponent, with the Republican-sounding name of Eldon “Buck” Sharpe Newton III is Chair of the Judiciary Committee. Good ‘ol Buck championed outlawing public mask wearing in protests and shepherded a performative measure limiting voting rights to citizens. More on Raymond Smith here.
We trust our engaged and on-the-ground NC partners to recommend candidates, but we’ll also revisit other potential candidates in NC and elsewhere after Q3 fundraising totals are released (shortly).
Again, no thermometers just yet, but I wanted to let you know about one of the directions we’ll be heading to this week.
There’s just too much going on for a *single post.
*Not if I want anyone to actually read it, that is.
You can just hear her asking, like a true