Throughout our conversation, Justice Frye made a clear argument as to the importance of voting and why it should be as open a process as possible.
He distills the vote importance of the vote into a simple concept. Those who can vote are represented, and those who cannot are not.
“So a person who has a right to vote has a right to challenge the person who votes differently from the way that person thinks you should vote. And so if you have a mass of people who can’t vote, if you are a representative elected by these people over here, and those folks don’t have anything to say about it, who are you going to look out for? Right? I mean that’s the practicalities of it. So, that’s why the vote is so important. And you can, if you don’t like what the person is doing, the next election you run somebody against that person, and if enough people don’t like it they can vote that new person in to replace this one. And that’s the whole idea”
We pushed him to codify further what he meant, asking whether there should be any restriction on voting. He responded with three basic qualifications.
“If you are of the required age, you live — meet the geographic requirements of living in that particular area, and your citizenship had not been taken away because you committed a felony, then by George you ought be able to register to vote. That’s the way I look at it, and by the way a whole lot of us had that same idea back when I was in the legislature. So we opened things up, made it easier for people to register and vote.”
He expanded that further to how he does not tolerate people who do not use their right to vote. He illustrated this with an example in his own life.
“I used to go to the barber shop — I go now sometimes. People would come in there, oh they would be talking about this or that, what is right or wrong. I said, ‘Where do you vote?’ ‘Oh I don’t vote.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to hear a thing you got to say. Go register to vote. Then vote. Then you have a right to talk about what is right and what’s wrong with the political system.’ And they got done quick.”
When we brought this conversation around H.B. 589, he stayed true to his feelings that there should not be more than those three basic qualifications to vote. We pushed back, bringing up how proponents of the bill say that they are in fact protecting the essence of a vote by ruling out fraud. Frye acknowledges that these claims are not new, and totally rejects this argument.
“Now we had those arguments back then, that there may have been some fraud. I said, well, thats why you got people to investigate and look into things. And so they investigated and looked into it and what did they find? I have forgotten the percentage, one tenth of one percent or something that’s whatever you may have somebody voting who was not qualified. Well that person is not going to make an effect on the whole voting system, on the whole thing. Now if you’d found 10% fraud then you’d have something to talk about. But I have not seen any statistics in North Carolina where it was such that you had a very high amount of fraud.”
But more importantly, he rejects the entire premise of making it harder to vote just to protect from possible fraud.
“I would much rather see three people who are registered and voted who did not have a right to register and vote then to have a thousand people who are kept from registering and voting because you make the thing so tight and so improper that they can’t even get out and register and vote.”
In all, Justice Frye makes it clear that he feels the vote is a fundamental right of all people, and thus should be awarded to and protected for all people that meet basic qualifications. He highlights how people need to use this right so that their voice is heard, and rejects any claim that the vote doesn’t matter or that it should be constrained.
“It is a fundamental thing for people. A voteless people is a hopeless people as they say.”
