North Carolina was a Jim Crow state, until it wasn’t; and then, in order to change its voting laws, the state’s legislators were forced to take it up with the Justice Department, until they didn’t have to anymore. Many said this would lead to unfettered voter suppression; old people, minorities, and poor people would face problems voting in elections because the rules would change and they would show up at the polls only to be disappointed and turned away.
In 2013, when the US supreme court made the determination that racism wasn’t the same issue that it had been in the civil rights era and struck down the requirement to have changes to voting laws approved by the JD, the NC General Assembly which was majority Republican, passed voting laws that they had been planning since the 2012 election. Laws that would end Sunday voting, cut voting hours, restrict avenues for voter registration, end straight ballot voting, and require a government issued ID at the time of voting.
It’s hard not to view the changes to NC’s voting laws as opportunistic; all of the laws would disproportionately affect the Democratic electorate of the state who were more likely to be registered to vote in high school, to vote on Sundays with a church group, to vote straight ticket Democrat, and not be in possession of a government issued ID. The whole situation is reminiscent of Democratic gerrymandering that produced NC’s infamous 12th district. Though, where one is purported to be a political power grab in the name of racial equality, the former registers as a consolidation of power at the expense of equality. Restricting voting is the stuff of villains, men who tent their fingers and laugh nefariously. But that is me applying my own feelings to the situation, were I a Republican politician in Raleigh at the time I am sure that I could’ve found a way to justify the action, claim my intent to protect the republic from would be voter frauds.
I don’t think that those opposed to the legislation were against preventing voter fraud. I’m sure that everyone believes that if fraud happens, then it’s abhorable and if an ID can stop it from happening, then we should have voter IDs that are easily obtainable for everyone that wants to vote. But the 2013 laws seemed to carry more significance than merely weeding out the possibility of fraud. What does it matter what day someone votes, as long as there are facilities to accommodate them without unnecessary expense? I may be wrong, but shouldn’t a democracy encourage voter participation, isn’t the holy grail of democratic voting 100% participation from the eligible electorate? Because the complete turn out is the only way to truly know how the electorate feels about decisions that are made on its behalf.
The 12th district is a travesty of another sort. I don’t mean to open up the can of worms that is a discussion of race in America, but if the eradication of racism is the aim, then we have to stamp it out completely, and the only way to do that is to learn to identify what racism really is and work to prevent it. It’s racist to draw a congressional district that ignores the standard for drawing districts in order to group together one specific race, that may even be the definition of racism. Regardless of it’s goal, which was presumably to have another black congressman from NC, it is the type of thing that we learned was ineffective from the separate but equal debate. I don’t buy that racism can be used for good either; it’s just like the word Nigger, if anybody is saying it then everyone has liberty to say it. We have to create better solutions to combat the evil, mean spirited racism that still exists with effective tactics rather than try to fight fire with fire. I don’t know that I’m qualified to find a solution, but a good first step is learning the difference between honoring one’s heritage and identifying ourselves with superficial labels that are reminiscent of India’s castes and South Africa’s apartheid, our own Jim Crow. I will always identify as African American formally, black casually, it’s the norm to me. But I wonder if a new nomenclature will ever emerge, in a future time when people have learned the apparently extremely difficult and bloody lesson that there is no value in the superficial label, not when there are other things that could be more telling.
Excuse the impassioned interlude, but I feel like no one’s really talking about race, just calling each other racists. I was easily distracted because the 12th district is a backwards interpretation of civil rights. The retaliation for that effort could be the voting laws of 2013. Not to say that we deserve to have our votes suppressed, but taking the higher ground in the 90s and finding other, less laughable ways of equaling the playing field would have set a precedence for good governing. It’s everyone’s fault if you’re looking for someone to blame.
But the American politician is tasked to be a winner, the limitations of scruples only apply when exploits are made public and subject to scrutiny.
In Ladoga, most of the local politicians are from the affluent parts of the city; mostly white males who attended Ladoga High School in their youth, in the decades before the black population increased and more schools were built on the West Side, and redistricting allowed the children of far west Ladoga to attend schools in neighboring cities. By the early nineties, the council welcomed its first black member, James Miles, whose family had moved from Ft. Mill, SC to west Ladoga when he was a child. There have since been many more black council members, though all resided on the West Side when they were elected to office.
The election to local offices of East Siders is so rare that most thought of it as an impossible feat. And when it happened for the first time that an East Sider was elected to the city council, there was a front page story alleging fraud. I’ve seen the issue of the Daily from 2010 and the writer of the front page story, M. Tarleton, explains that the mere fact that not one, but three East Siders were selected to fill three vacant seats on the council was evidence enough of foul play. I think the fact that the Daily ran Tarleton’s ridiculous allegations front page was evidence of the Daily’s bias, and the sad state of Ladoga politics. It seemed that West Siders, or the ones most vocal with accusations of fraud, were shocked that their expectations for replacements to the vacant seats weren’t met, as though the councilmen were already chosen. Tarleton’s only real indictment was that the three East Siders who were elected to the empty seats were relatively unknown on the West Side and data from the board of elections revealed that the three East Siders easily won the election despite the fact that West Siders have historically turned out more voters in every type of election held in the city. But I don’t think it holds up, the assumption that East Siders were politically apathetic even when three people came along who championed their plight and promised to work on their behalf. I think that promise is enough to inspire action.
I discussed it with one of my old basketball coaches, Charlie Douglas, who still coaches an AAU team at the community center in east Ladoga. “I voted that year and I volunteered with the campaign to get the East Siders voted in. We all worked hard, organized community events and websites, tried to get the West Side involved. It went good, I thought. At the winter festival that year, we prepared a video about the city’s history that went over well. We wanted to show that the East Side was proud to live in Ladoga, despite the history. We wanted to make things better going forward. So we had two goals; they told us they wanted to inspire people to actually show up and vote, and show people that they had ideas to make Ladoga a great place to live.”
Coach Douglas told me that only one of the three East Siders was black and I got a little disappointed. But, he said, “It only mattered that they had the best interests of the East Side in mind, and they were the three people most likely to get votes from a West Sider.”
The three East Siders were Dr. Evan Schmitt, Harold Johnson, and Laura Burns, all registered democrats with an interest in using city money to better serve what they saw as the most deserving and least served parts of the city; notably the elderly, schools and libraries, and minority communities like the Bottoms and the North Side Projects.
Dr. Evan Schmitt worked at the free clinic in southeast Ladoga and found himself compelled to run for city council because he knew for a fact that city funds were spent to add additions to the already well equipped Carolina’s Medical Center location in west Ladoga and that hardly anything was allocated to the free clinic where practically all uninsured residents on the East Side went for care, which meant that few patients actually received treatments that they needed. It angered Dr. Schmitt enough for him to relocate his family to the southEast Side. “Schmitty’s a good man,” Coach Douglas said. “He retired a couple years back, but he’s still grooming people to represent the East Side on the council. The guy that replaced him, Jerald Hunt, was born and raised in the Bottoms. Now, he’s the head supervisor at the turkey plant and he’s been stirring up talk against right to work laws in the state. Schmitty told me that Hunt was looking to get on the economic development committee, diversify jobs on the East Side.” Dr. Schmitt was able to secure more funding for the clinic in the East Side and he makes sure that new council members understand its importance.
Harold Johnson was a retired Air Force officer in 2010, and a prominent member of the east Ladoga community. He’d spearheaded the initiative that brought the community center to the East Side in the 80’s and was well known around town for organizing community events like sports tournaments and block parties. “Everyone knew Officer Johnson,” Coach Douglas said and it’s true. He was usually the one people handed the microphone to at community events to make a speech. I wanted to be like him when I was a kid. He seemed like the kind of man to look up to. Johnson despised the Ladoga city police and organized protests against the department that he accused of failing to thoroughly investigate crimes perpetrated on the East Side. He knew that city council members selected the chief of police and he wanted to make sure that someone with the East Side’s interests had a say in selecting the person who would fill the position once the sitting chief retired. Mr. Johnson was unable to influence the selection of the police chief, but he was able to improve the safety of eastside inhabitants by insisting on a more community friendly police presence and encouraging cooperation of the community with police investigations.
Laura Burns and her family had settled in a quiet east Ladoga community where she and her husband had three children, two dogs and a parakeet. Burns had been a public defender in Charlotte before becoming pregnant with the couple’s first child, and they decided to relocate in search of lower property taxes. As her children got older, she looked for ways to put all of her pent up duty to her fellow man to use; she was active in her children’s school and in her church. She was a firm believer in human rights and wrote a strongly worded editorial for the Daily in 2009 decrying the city’s growing arsenal of drone aircraft which the city purchased with a combination of seized money from criminal and narcotics cases, as well as surpluses in the budget. Burns showed up to every city council meeting to scrutinize the council’s logic behind the continued acquisition of the drones. She was never satisfied with the council’s response. The council credited the drones in the successful rescue of a missing child who had slipped and fallen into a deep ditch in a wooded area where developers had started and stopped work on an upscale community in southwest Ladoga. Also, the use of the drones was said to be an integral component of ongoing investigations that could be ruined if detailed in a public forum. Burns was sure that the money could be put to better use. She was able to examine the police department’s log of use of their drone fleet and oversaw the selling of all but one of the aircraft after she was able to expose police abuses of the technology. Apparently an officer was using the machines to spy on his ex-wife who was cheating on him.
Those who believed that the three very responsible and respectable members of the Ladoga community were capable of fraud say that they formed a pact to win by any means. I attempted to correspond with Tarleton, who had written the indictment for the Daily in 2010, in hopes of finding out if any evidence of fraud had ever been identified or substantiated. He sent me an email explaining that he only replied to tell me not to contact him again, but not before explaining that the truth will always find its way to the light.
Coach Douglas did his best to explain to me what some believed happened in 2010. “More people from the West Side usually vote, that’s pretty much a fact, but the board of elections told the Daily that more people from the East Side voted that year. So the West Side starts accusing the East Side polling officials of I guess stuffing ballots for our three. They looked through the register of East Side voters and claimed that it was full of dead people and people that had moved, but you know when we did the same thing to the westside register the numbers were pretty much the same. Both sides needed a good update. And they point to elections since then because there have consistently been more West Side voters, but only by a small number. It makes sense to me though, you know they’ll work harder after they get beat once. But they couldn’t undo 2010, there’s been somebody from the east since then.”
Dr. Schmitt denied on record for the Daily any knowledge of or participation in voter fraud in the 2010 election. He dismissed the allegations as preposterous and evidence of the elitist attitude of the West Siders who had lodged complaints.
Mr. Johnson has consistently refused to even entertain the allegations.
Mrs. Burns and her family moved to Vermont in 2012. I managed to get her on the phone recently, but when I mentioned Ladoga, she said that the local politician part of her life was over and she’d rather leave the past in the past.
In all the years I’d lived in Ladoga, I’d never taken any interest in its politics. I can’t imagine that something like the fraud conspiracy was even necessary in a place like Ladoga. But everyone is jockeying for the best position and politicians on every scale, it seems, will do anything for the win. A truth that neither exonerates the three East Siders, nor validates those from the west who accused them.
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