Section 1: 0:00 – 0:20 (0:20)
Cassidy Seggern: “Let’s just start with on July 25, 2013 when you were in the North Carolina Senate chamber when House Bill 589 was passed into law. What were you thinking in that moment?”
Section 2: 0:20 – 1:23 (1:03)
Senator Daniel Blue: “Déja vu as much as anything else—here we go again. First, I thought that people just didn’t appreciate the substantial advancements we that had made in making the ballot accessible to more people. That had been a challenge that I thought we had been addressing aggressively over the past 15 or 20 years, based on studies, based on statistics that we had seen about the low voting rate in North Carolina. We had, over that period of time, figured out how to get more people to participate, making that voting easier, making it more convenient and even reaching out, trying to bring young folk along to participate even before they were eligible to participating in voting. So there were a wide range of emotions that I felt that day and it was obvious to me what the purpose of what that particular election bill was.”
Section 3: 1:23 – 1:34 (0:11)
CS: “It seems like from an outsider’s perspective, a very historic moment. What was the atmosphere like in the room between you and the other senators? What was the general feel?”
Section 4: 1:34 – 3:01 (1:27)
DB: “You’re talking on the bill that was basically rolling back all of the voting rights?”
CS: “Yes.”
DB: “That was the expression the African-American members all had grounded to some degree and the evolution of voting rights. The other Democrats sort of felt that it was an assault on democracy in the sense that it was an effort to sort of tamper down active participation by groups that tended to vote democratic. The effort to eliminate straight-ticket voting and a multitude of issues like that, so that’s the kind of stuff that people were expressing their outrage at tightening up access to the ballot again. There were some historic comparisons made to one hundred and fifty, one hundred years ago—not just immediately after the Civil War, but basically at the turn of the last century when efforts were made to prevent other ethnic groups from voting, whether in Boston, Massachusetts with the Irish, or efforts that had been made over time to limit access to the ballot.”
Section 5: 3:01 – 3:19 (0:18)
CS: “You’ve had a thirty-five year span as a politician in North Carolina. You’ve seen the advancements of democracy and development of rights for minority groups. How big of a set back do you think House Bill 589 was for minority rights?”
Section 6: 3:19 – 9:57 (6:38)
DB: “Not just minority rights. Understand, if I could a little bit, that prior to 2008, the difference between minority participation in elections and majority participation in elections was double-digits—the percent voting of those eligible. Over the course of the 12-year period, roughly, we had managed to tighten that gap so that in 2008, the percentage of African-Americans voting in North Carolina actually exceeded the percentage of whites voting in North Carolina.
Now, some of that had to do with the Obama organizing effort, but also, it was consistent, even in the following election, the percentages and [patterns] were holding. So we had managed to eradicate all of these barriers that had been built up to voting in a decade, decade and a half and thought it was part of the elections fabric from that point on. The feeling on that there, I think, is that this thing was sprung on us because it started as a one or two-page bill and overnight, exploded into a 30 or 40-page bill. I was on the committee that considered it and had not seen it until the committee met. In fact, I was struggling to read through it to see exactly what it said. It was posted maybe about midnight the night before. I have of being tired pretty much at midnight, because I get up very early, so I didn’t check my email to whether it had gone on the legislative site. But anyhow, the earliest it would’ve been available would’ve been about midnight the night before and it pops out in the committee. As we see it in committee, it’s just on steroids, fast-track and we knew it was going to get enacted. I think was just a few days after the US Supreme Court had determined that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which was about the implementation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, was invalid. So once that signal was sent, the legislature of North Carolina and the leadership got very busy to go back and rescind most of that kind of legislation that we had enacted over the last 20 years, for the most part, because the United States Department of Justice didn’t have to pre-clear this bill and see what the effect of it was going to be.
But the point that I wanted to make is, that it was not only an affront to minority voting rights, but we had basically made it much easier for everyone to vote. We had made a 17-day period of early voting so that people could vote conveniently, they could vote at their own leisure rather than all being crammed into one or two days or having mail-in absentee voting. But the other important thing that we had done is automatically register 17-year olds for the next election and even earlier than that, getting them involved, sort of a continuation of an effort to teach civics responsibility of participating. So it was rolling that back, rolling back early voting, it was rolling [back] the number of days for early voting and as we looked at it—you’ve got to understand—starting after I got out of law school in the mid 70s, the case then to register to vote, you literally had to go down to the elections board to vote. Later, there was a twist on that—you either had to go to the election board or find the judge within your precinct or the registrar within your precinct. You’d go to his or her house and register to vote and have a notary and all of that stuff. Following that, there was a system of floating registrars, people who could actually go to different sites and register you to vote, so no longer you had to go to the registrar in your precinct or down to the country board of elections. But there was a system so that people could actually take applications to churches, to meetings, to shopping centers, to places that people would naturally gather, schools and stuff, to get them registered. And so I’d seen the evolution of this process for the situation where you had to register on site with your registrar at the board of elections to a floating registrar then to a system where you could grab a bunch of cards—non-registrars—and get you registered and take it down to the board of elections and they would confirm it. It was making it easier all along for people to participate in the most fundamental right in this democracy. I thought that it had some permanence in the way that these chances were occurring and so there were a lot of discussions in the committee as well as among the members, as to what a significant rollback this was.
It was all being done under the pretext that people were voting, somewhere or other, who weren’t entitled to vote. You had the photo ID requirements and all those kinds of things. It was a bill that lawyered up in a way that I hadn’t seen recently in the legislature and without the input of those of us who had really lived with this issue and understood what we were trying to do. Not so much just in minority voting, but to increase the voting rate of people in North Carolina. Young people, rural people, poor people—rural people because they had further to go to register when they wanted to get registered. You know, their closest courthouse might be 20, 25 miles from where they live and you had all of those issues. We were just trying to make this fundamental right more accessible to everybody. It just arguably had a greater impact on minorities because the numbers showed that minorities had taken the greatest advantage of these changes that we had made in the voting laws over the years.
Section 7: 9:57 – 10:01 (0:04)
CS: “And it was kind of all undone overnight?”
Section 8: 10:01 – 11:38 (1:37)
DB: “Overnight, overnight. Literally overnight to basically say that we’re going to have some kind of ID and that’s what the bill started out as—a voter ID bill that you had to have some kind of valid ID. And it started out with a reasonable accommodation of different forms of identification: student ID and six or seven different forms of ID. By the time the Supreme Court had backed off enforcement of Section 5, they figured that they could abandon that and in fact, in the initial bill that passed, it was a very limited form of ID that could be accepted. The argument that I made relating to you Duke students is that, not many people are going to spend 50, 60 thousand dollars a year to get a fake Duke ID card so that they can go vote in a fraudulent way. Now there may be some folk that would spend 60, 70 thousand dollars to do that, but that would be the rarity and so there was no justification for not using valid student IDs for schools in North Carolina. They chose not to do that, and in fact, came back and would not accept the ID from the state universities. That was changed maybe a year ago—that piece wasn’t, but some of the more restrictive parts of it were modified last year just before the federal judge heard the arguments on why the voter ID law was unconstitutional.”
Section 9: 11:38 – 11:46 (0:08)
CS: “So, do you think that the Democratic party was not sufficiently mobilized beforehand or did they wake up to this issue too late?”
Section 10: 11:46 – 13:30 (1:44)
DB: “No, the party was mobilized and all of us sort of saw what was happening once they sprung it. But when you’ve got a majority, and especially a supermajority, and you’re not interested in other people’s ideas—you’re going to ram your thoughts down their throats anyhow—that’s what happened. They were not interested in any competing ideas or not interested in the studies that showed that people really liked one-stop voting and early voting. It was only after the flood of calls and emails from people across the entire political spectrum that they accommodated a broader schedule of early voting. Now, it’s become the preferred way of voting in North Carolina and in 2012, half of the votes had been cast before the election date and that may have been the case in 2008 or close to it. In a typical election now, 30, 40 percent of votes are cast before Election Day. Well initially, that window had been closed pretty tightly, but because of the outcry from Democrats and Republicans, they expanded it to have a comparable number of hours, but fewer days to do early voting. But it was not that the Democrats were asleep—the majorities were so great and the governor was going to sign it anyhow, the governor didn’t try to put together a real effort to sustain his veto. He bought it line, hook, and sinker and decided that he too would join the bandwagon to limit access to voting in North Carolina.”
Section 11: 13:30 – 13:33 (0:03)
CS: “Do you think there was anything that could have been done to stop it?”
Section 12: 13:33 – 15:29 (1:56)
DB: “No. I mean, once they decided that they could take advantage of it, they were going to. Now, one historic thing that you have to appreciate is—and I’ll share this with you—in 1800, the voting participation of black males in North Carolina exceeded the voting participation of white males. I mention males because they were the only ones who could vote before the women’s suffrage movement created the right to vote for women. By 1902, that number had gone from 70 or 80 percent down to zero. Zero. We had seen things move this swiftly before, but that was ancient times before people could find out you were doing all this—you didn’t have all the modern modes of communication and stuff. Some folk, we made those analogies and comparisons and so it didn’t surprise me that they could do it because we’d seen it done before. The time before is at the turn of the last century. Race was the predominant reason for which it was done and they openly admitted that was the reason. It was not an open admission this time. Again, it was under the pretext that there was fraudulent voting and so you had to have the photo ID, although there was a disproportionate effect on African-American with the ID than it was with other components of the population. Many of the other aspects had nothing at all to do with fraudulent voting, ID or anything like that. It’s just they decided to limit the access to the ballot to get a political advantage and did not care that it had a disproportionate effect on minority voters.
Section 13: 15:29 – 15:41 (0:12)
CS: “Backtracking a little bit, you began college right after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965—“
DB: “Yeah, I started college in ’66.”
Section 14: 15:41 – 17:20 (1:39)
CS: “Did you grow up hearing stories about friends or loved ones being denied the right to vote?”
DB: “Oh, sure, sure.”
CS: “How close to home does this issue hit?”
DB: “It was common practices in most southern states—in North Carolina it was a little bit different than most, but the voter registration and participation of African-Americans in North Carolina wasn’t anything that you’d want to brag about. That’s why—even in college and in law school—I went on voter registration drivers. I remember particularly the polling place for me when I was at Duke law school, there was an old school on Erwin Road just before what was then the graduate complex—Trent Hall and all of those places. I remember walking up there and we were doing voter registration drives to get people to come vote because there was a sizable African-American community right in the area where the Veterans Administration Hospital is on Erwin Road. So you go through there and we students who would go through there and get people lined up, get them to go vote and stuff in anticipation of the 1972 elections because that was the first election I could vote in and so I had real interest in doing it. The more I looked at it, the more I realized the real importance of educating people on what was happening and so I saw the lack of an opportunity to that with respect to what was going with that effort.”
Section 15: 17:20 – 17:38 (0:18)
CS: “So the Souls to the Polls initiative before House Bill 589 was something that had a major impact on African-American voter turnout. How do you think the elimination of early voting and Souls to the Polls impacted African-American voter turnout?”
Section 16: 17:38 – 22:44 (5:06)
DB: “We won’t know until there are some other studies done, but it was much easier to gather people where they were. You know, part of this Souls to the Polls movement was to get people at church on two Sundays, since you had the early voting on two different Sundays at least, and so you could organize around churches, which is where people are on Sundays, especially a disproportionate amount of African-Americans percentage-wise in the population. You could organize transportation as an issue for poorer people, who in many instances, were disproportionately African-American. But they would be at church, so you could use church buses or church vans or volunteers who would be at church to transport a huge number of people to these one-stop voting places and get them voted before the regular election day, which is on a Tuesday, which for most people was a work day. You were getting people to vote on days that they didn’t have to be at work, days they didn’t have to be doing whatever chores they were going to be doing at the end of the week, and it was just convenient. It made sense and I think it was sort of acknowledging that we were in the 21st century rather than back in the 19th century.
And so that’s what Souls to the Polls took advantage of—utilizing these things that people would naturally do and at the end of the day, that’s what it ought to be. It ought to be easy, it ought to be automatic, almost, and American as a western nation had one of the lowest voting rates of any of the western countries. Some of us thought that we ought to improve on it, so the way that we would do it in North Carolina was to try to make voting still very responsible, still very honest, but make it much easier and I thought we had seemed to be doing that. In fact, before this bill was enacted in 2013, North Carolina probably had as great or greater participation of minorities of any of the southern states and I compared it with the states of the old Confederacy because that’s where most of the restrictions had the harshest application, in the old Confederacy. They had some of the same restrictions in the northern or southwestern states, but they weren’t as harsh and they weren’t as ever-present, I guess omnipresent as they were in the southern states. We had made an effort and got greater participation. It was much easier to vote and not just in the first decade of this century, but from the Voting Rights Act forward, because of the location of colleges and young people across North Carolina, [we] had incorporated many more students in active pursuit of democracy.
Again, not just with the African-American students, but with students generally, the determination by Republican leaders was to make it more difficult for students to vote. As a result, they were encouraging election boards to remove voting places from college campuses. You’ve got a university of 30,000 students at North Carolina State University. 30,000. You know, if it were a separate city, it would be one of the 50 largest cities in the state and a decision was made to inconvenience the students by moving the polling place from there. Same thing at Appalachian State up in Boone. Over 10,00 students and with a polling place convenient for them, so they decided to move it somewhere on the side of a road that’s on a steep incline far from the campus, [making] it inconvenient for students to vote. And that story can be told across the state, removing polling places from some historically black university campuses, which had a double whammy effect, not only [on] the minority voting, but the youth voting. Having not been able to vote until I was 21, I can appreciate what it is to be able to vote when you’re 18. It’s something that came out of protests during the Vietnam War with the thought that if you can carry an M16, you should be able to vote as to whether you would carry that M16. There were a lot of those discussions going on and thoughts about those sort of things, so that’s pretty much a broad approach to it.”
Section 17: 22:44 – 23:16 (0:32)
Mitchell Gladstone: “On the Souls to the Polls issue, I reached out to Reverend Wade, who I know is the pastor at your church in Raleigh. I know you have connections there. I would assume that some of the people in your congregation are some of your constituents as well. What has been their response to the whole issue? Have they come back to you—I know you said it was meant to inconvenience—and had any response of it being harder?
Section 18: 23:16 – 26:54 (3:38)
DB: “Sure. In finishing the thought on Souls to the Polls, it was very effective because it was designed to be so that it could accommodate people’s real lives. You could change from practices we’d been observing for last 100 years—modern day practices. In talking with people generally, not only at church, but [also] my constituency, they tell me how it was much more convenient for them to vote when over a two-Sunday-period, they could go to the polling place when they went with the church or with the church van. Our church is a small church and I’m talking basically about the efforts in the larger churches. Our church is a relatively affluent church—more so than the average—so it wasn’t felt as greatly among our congregation. But it was felt very, very deeply by my constituents in general, depending on which part of the district they may come from. I still hear from people as to the effects it has on them.
I will say that over the last three years, particularly the last two and a half years, there have been all kinds of organizations—my church involved—that have worked hard to come up with alternative ways to ensure that people still participated. On the voter ID stuff, to make sure that people had gotten voter ID cards if they didn’t have a driver’s license or making sure they got passports or other ways to show they are who they are. Because even after the amendment of the law last year allowing you to vote provisionally if you could show your phone bill or all of those things that used to allow you to vote unconditionally, they still needed to have people ready to vote. It began to be a question of not just how they complain about not being able to do Souls to the Polls or how they may have been adversely affected by that, but how the overall law adversely affects some of what they had been doing as volunteers, some of what they had been doing in their own right to vote, [and] some of what they had been doing to encourage young people in the church to vote. Part of the effort—when somebody turned 17—had you done the preregistration…
I will say one other thing, just in passing. It might not be the right place. I was proud to read in the News and Observer yesterday that Wake County public schools have registered a tremendous amount of the students—30-some hundred students have been registered because the public schools decided they need to be active and more involved in getting high school seniors and juniors who will be 18 years old by Election Day to at least be prepared to vote, if they want to. So it’s those kind of things, people individually realizing what the new law provided, took it upon themselves to encourage young people—in our church and among my constituency—to get registered, to get the ID, to vote by written absentee, which is easier than one-stop voting because you don’t have to produce your ID and all that. They adapted and that’s good, but they shouldn’t have to go through inconveniences to enable people to vote.”
Section 19: 26:54 – 27:16 (0:22)
MG: “You talk about the idea of the right to vote. It’s always sort of been about making your voice heard and being able to have your say. Do your constituents feel as if they aren’t being heard and their voices aren’t being allowed to speak as part of the democracy?”
Section 20: 27:16 – 28:20 (1:04)
DB: “Well they think that they’ve got the greatest senator that’s ever been created.” [Laughter] “But the other thing is, they’re angry. It’s not an ongoing anger, but they are angry that people would have the nerve to try to roll back the hands of the clock to make it more difficult to vote at a time when other states in the country are still working to make it easier—whether it’s mail-in ballots…I think one state has total mail-in ballots now—Oregon or Washington or one of the western states…Again, allowing people to exercise that most fundamental right as easily as possible. So they get angered about that and anger can generate negative or positive things and I think it’s generated some positive things because it’s still working to get people involved, working to let people know that there’s always these forces trying to reclaim victories that you think have been settled.”
Section 21: 28:20 – 28:32 (0:12)
MG: “You’ve talked about the difference between a “first-class” and a “second-class” citizen. How do you particularly differentiate between the two in your mind?
Section 22: 28:32 – 30:15 (1:43)
DB: “I think all citizens are first-class citizens in [that] they have certain, basic fundamental rights. I think that there are policies put in place that try to make them seem like they are different. One of the things you look at…[inaudible]….it is much easier to vote absentee if you use a mail-in ballot because Republicans were disproportionately using mail-in ballots rather than one-stop voting. So you didn’t have the same ID requirements, you didn’t have many of the impediments that were placed before people who, in a disproportionate number, were minorities, were young people, were people who got inspired to vote at the last minute when they wanted to register during the early voting period. [People] who got inspired to vote because they heard some political leader or somebody say something that inspired them. With the technology now, there’s no justification for having long, extended registration periods. You can verify somebody’s identity immediately and figure out whether they voted or not, so early registration and same-day registration—things that were eliminated—are things that modern society has come to expect. And so, when you take away those kinds of things, you do make a distinction in the voting and when you don’t have easy access, you become a second-class citizen for voting purposes.”
Section 23: 30:15 – 30:44 (0:29)
MG: “The day that the bill was passed—I watched your speech—you read an editorial from the News and Observer, explaining about how much of an impact the law would have. In a way to summarize it up, you said, ‘If people don’t like what the government is doing, they have the right to change it. But now, this law is going to severely limit the right that people have.’”
Section 24: 30:44 – 32:11 (1:27)
DB: “When you couple taking away the right to vote, making it more difficult and you then draw districts that herd people who you think are sort of alike into the same districts—I used the verb very intentionally, you HERD them into it—you think that you can institute policies that clearly work to the detriment of those people that you’ve herded into certain districts through gerrymandering. [People] whose rights you’ve made it much more difficult to vote and you’ve done it because you don’t have enough faith and confidence in the policies that you’re enacting to think that they can withstand the scrutiny that people are going to subject them to. Or that they can withstand the anger that people would exercise their various options against you when they would get a chance to, so you insulate yourself, thinking that they can’t get to you. My point was that the whole political process is about people expressing their preferences, but it ought to be based on what they think about how you are representing them and if you’re missing the mark and not representing the way they think they ought to be represented, they ought to be able to remove you. That’s the purpose of elections.”
Section 25: 32:11 – 32:37 (0:26)
MG: “So you talk about these people who are essentially herded—and I guess my question is, how much does this law widen that gap because you essentially have what you might call “second-class” citizens that are herded into an area and these other are not not nearly as impacted? How much does a law like this widen the gap between those two groups of people?
Section 26: 32:37 – 34:00 (1:23)
DB: “And again, let me say, the citizens aren’t second-class. [The government is] treating them a different way, trying to make them seem like second class. I think that this law exacerbates that and it goes straight down the divide that they tried to create. Your opinions just don’t matter to them and they want you segregated out so that they won’t have to listen to your opinions. I think these kinds of laws remove you from the competition of different and competing ideas in the marketplace of ideas. So it prevents you from developing whatever the best product is that competing ideas create. I think that, at the end of the day, it makes those who hold the differing viewpoints that might be able to make somebody change their mind on some position—it puts them in a second-class citizen position because their ideas aren’t being listened or heard to and not being considered. And so even though they might be able to vote on certain things, you’ve made it more difficult for them to, but when they jump all of the hurdles, and are able to vote, that vote doesn’t carry as much meaning as it would if it were in the bowl of ideas when they are being considered in competition with each other.”
Section 27: 34:00 – 34:48 (0:48)
MG: “It’s sort of ironic that you talk about these different viewpoints because on the bill, there were many Republicans—including Senate Majority leader Harry Brown —whom I know you have worked with in the past as a senator that voted yes on the bill and I know that all 13 Democrats that were in the Senate that day voted no. I guess it leads me to ask, why did it prove so impossible for you to reach a common ground with the Republicans? Because there was such an obvious, distinct line draw with all 37 Republicans on one side and all of the Democrats on the other.”
Section 28: 34:48 – 41:04 (6:16)
DB: “It’s interesting that you would ask that question. Constitutions are drawn so that you don’t get the tyranny of the majority. It’s to protect minority rights because as long as it’s just an even fight, you can expect that you’re going to get even justice, but you have to protect minority viewpoints [and] minority participants. Now you asked why is it so difficult for us to work with the Republicans. It’s not difficult for us to work with them, but when they have a super majority and determine that their position on issues will be determined within their caucus, any external ideas or input are not going to matter. All you can do is throw something against the wall that’s already been erected. We tried to work with them to point out some of the shortcomings in the legislation, but once they come out of their caucus with a certain position, then it’s very difficult to have any impact on it and that was the conversation with Senator Brown. They weren’t interested in looking at studies that showed how this bill was going to disproportionately affect African-Americans or young people. And I realize that they weren’t interested because that’s the result that they wanted anyhow, so if you want to have that as the end product, why are you going to listen to somebody who will embarrass you by telling you and showing you that’s the end product you’re seeking? Ideally, this is what would happen: if you did not have gerrymandering to the degree that you’ve got it, in many of the districts that are Republican districts, you would have Democrats and you would have African-Americans in them and it could moderate the discussion and the decisions. Not that they would be different, but there would be different viewpoints expressed within those elections and as a result of those different viewpoints, somebody might embrace a broader framework of ideas and the way that they would go about solving the problem. That is the pernicious effect of gerrymandering. That is creating districts that are so overwhelmingly one party or one group or the other that you don’t have to listen to the other ideas.
When you couple that with determining what the outcome is going to be in a caucus, then you’ve moved the philosophy that your district is going to be representative of further, either to the left or to the right, depending on which way you want to gerrymander. You’ve taken all of the competing ideas or most of the competing ideas out of it, so that you don’t have to hear them as you are the campaign trail. You don’t have to listen to anyone who’s got a different viewpoint and you think that’s what the gospel is, what you’re hearing from the people in that narrowly defined district that you have. You go pursue that and if you can take a situation where 35, 40 percent of the people can determine what the conversation is, then you can have 35 or 40 percent of the people in those kind of narrow districts determining what the public policy of the state is and that’s effectively what we have, given the runaway system of gerrymandered districts. Then, when you take away the tools that we would otherwise use—whether they are used by a minority or used by a majority—when you start affecting the way that you would exercise your displeasure with those folk through early voting, through efforts that make it easier for you to express yourself, then you’re sort of even further isolating yourself from what the majority of people think.
What I’m saying is these things went hand-in-hand, not only is it the gerrymandering, which occurred just a year or two years earlier, but it’s also, after I design the district I want to design, then I will make it tougher for folk who might not agree with me to come after me [or] to punish me for positions that I am taking. So if I make it more difficult for my enemy—sworn or not—to vote, make it more difficult for them to register, make it more difficult for them to express themselves in any form, then I can preserve myself in office longer. The reason that I say it had to be by design [is] because it was intentionally aimed at young people, who tend to be more idealistic, and much more encompassing in their thoughts and beliefs, and much more encouraging to have different ideas because they feel they can argue successfully, ideas that might challenge what they believe. So, you isolate the young people out, again, by eliminating their participation, their polling places, or their early registration, or people are less likely to have the voter IDs. A kid from Maryland who comes to Duke to go to school for four years is a North Carolina resident, but that doesn’t say he or she is going to get a North Carolina driver’s license. You create it so that it’s a difficult task for them to vote, then you’re supressing the youth vote that might disagree with you.
You look at the things that have been most effective in increasing the minority vote and you take those things away, not anticipating that somebody will be able to offset that by teaching alternative ways to vote or to register. But you take those paths away that people would normally pursue who would come after you because they don’t agree with what you’re doing, and you end up surpassing democracy by doing those things. That’s what makes it difficult—to some degree—for us to reach a common accord on where things ought to go because the way the system has been designed, it tries to marginalize the thoughts of those that many of us Democrats represent.”
Section 29: 41:04 – 41:28 (0:24)
MG: “Do you think that the main difference was them purely not wanting to listen—not wanting to listen to you, not wanting to listen to the people of the state of North Carolina—or was it something else that was the true difference between your viewpoint on the issue and their viewpoint on the issue?”
Section 30: 41:28 – 48:53 (7:25)
DB: “It’s the age-old thing. Power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. If you are in power, your natural tendency is to do whatever you think is necessary to keep yourself in power, rather than taking a broad view of things because that might put you at risk for staying in power. I think that is what we face too often in the legislative process now and that’s why democracy is sort of sitting on a precipice, both at the national level and at many state levels. Let me give you a case in point, and I was making a joke out of it when we first started the discussion. Last week, we had a special session of the General Assembly and in that session of the General Assembly, the reason for the call of the session was that somebody had conducted a poll—a Republican poll—that showed that the issue that energized the Republican base more than any issue was the continuation of this animosity—in a large segment of the Republican base in this state and this nation—against the LGBT revolution of the last six or eight years and especially, the way it has moved through the court system in the last two or three years with decisions granting LGBT rights, especially the question on gay marriage. In the primary in 2014, North Carolina had on its ballot a question whether or not gay marriages ought to be prohibited. In the face of decisions from most of the circuit courts around the United States, saying that it was unconstitutional to discriminate against marriage—at least government sanctioned marriage…you can do whatever you want in churches—it was put on the ballot in North Carolina with its then-Republican leadership (current Senator Thom Tillis) saying, we do this, but within 15 to 20 years, it will be for naught because this is where the country will have moved. Well, he didn’t know that it had been moved from glacial speed to warp speed and it was going to happen within two years of him making a statement.
But anyhow, in polling in North Carolina, it still showed that that was a wedge issue, a popular issue that would make the Republican base get energized and go vote. So the decision was made in a special session of the legislature—the regular session of the legislature starts four weeks from yesterday—but to call a special session of the General Assembly to deal with one issue. Charlotte decided that they were going to modernize their city code so they passed an ordinance, adding to the current non-discrimination ordinance that they had, which prohibited discrimination in employment and in several other areas based on race, national origin, gender, and religion. They added to it general gender preference described as basically transgender—that’s what it was aimed at including—because by definition, it already included the LBGT community as a broad factor. They did that and they found a reason to call this special session to rescind that under the pretext that all of a sudden, you made children and women in the state unsafe because you’re going to let transgender people use women’s bathrooms. That was the whole issue, regardless of how it was characterized.
So now, not only do we call the session to that, which was say don’t let transgender people use female bathrooms because it endangers children—every school district in the state has already dealt with that for the most part—and so you don’t want transgender kids taking showers with 12, 13, 14-year old girls, that was the issue because that was what the public testimony was. But they seized an opportunity again, because of this animus that was created when the court of appeals and district court of North Carolina, later Supreme Court, said that you could not prohibit gay marriages and that you had to perform them in the state. They used it as an opportunity to repeal all of the local ordinances by cities and counties that were sort of enlightened and said that you can’t discriminate against people who were in the LGBT community. Not only did they remove those anti-discrimination provisions, but they also removed the provision that said you can sue under North Carolina law for race discrimination, gender discrimination, and religious discrimination in the private marketplace.
Now, I mention that to you because all of that was done from 10 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night in 12-hour period. The decision was made not to let Democrats participate in the discussions. The bill was not even made available to Democrats until the first committee met at 10:15 on Wednesday morning—an opportunity to even read the final version of the bill. Democrats’ ideas weren’t sought. Those who tried to change it in committee were ignored, even though they had just seen the bill. In the House, which considered it first, their members they gave the Democrats five minutes to read it. This was a bill that was taken up last week, but its eleventh draft had been run through the General Assembly two weeks earlier and it had been used in Republican caucuses as they talked about what they wanted this bill to represent. People representing over a third of the people in the state had no access to it. The problem that you have is when you’ve determined that you don’t want any other viewpoint, you don’t want any competing position on it, and you’re going to cram it anyhow, you can’t complain that people won’t participate in that kind of farce with you. Ultimately, that’s what the Senate Democrats did. We said, ‘We aren’t going to participate in this kind of farce. It makes no sense. We’re not rolling the clock back. We’re not turning our back on 40, 50 years of anti-discrimination laws that we developed in North Carolina. We’re not doing away with the cause of action of North Carolina law for anti-discrimination in the workplace and anywhere else just because it’s convenient for you to get your base charged up and get mad about some of the evolving rights of the LGBT community in North Carolina.”
Section 31: 48:53 – 49:45 (0:52)
MG: “Pulling back and looking toward the voting rights issue, you talk about sort of having this 40, 50 years of evolution. And 50 years ago in the 1960s, race was the flashpoint issue. But in this case, it’s sort of the same thing. For the lawsuit to be overturned, the plaintiffs would obviously have to prove that the intent of the law was to be biased racially. Do you think that this law now was meant to disenfranchise African-Americans or to disenfranchise Democrats or to disenfranchise some other larger group as a whole?”
Section 32: 49:45 – 53:42 (3:57)
DB: “It would be tough to show that the specific intent—yes, I do. It would be under the pretext of punishing Democrats by saying somewhere that the Democrats have acquired votes by fraudulent means and people have committed voter fraud. Well, voter fraud in North Carolina is a pretty serious felony and I think all of the studies show that over the course of 20 or 30 years, it’s been 0.00-some number, some insignificant number. In fact, about one to two percent of the votes in any election could be questioned or are questionable because of machine mistakes. Fraudulent voting in North Carolina is statistically insignificant and to roll back all of these voting advances under the pretext of protecting the voting place from fraudulent voting has to show some other reason for the actions that were taken.
Now, why do I say that about that bill (H.B. 589)? Because you look at it in context. I mentioned again the effort to gerrymander districts. One of the things I look at when I analyze all of the election tape activity—at least in the Senate—prior to 2011, when the Senate was redistricted, there was no Senate district in North Carolina that had a majority minority population. No Senate district had more than 50% African-American population in it, but there were nine African-American senators. Following the 2011 redistricting effort, there were 10 districts created in North Carolina that had more than a 50 percent black population. All kinds of effort were made to stuff the minority vote into the same districts. We had districts where minorities had beaten powerful incumbents that were less than 30 percent minority population because they crowded them and made them 50 percent plus. When you’re using race as a basis to do something like that, then I have to believe that race plays a role in these other election-type things that you’re doing. Greater still, the Congressional redistricting effort had the same kind of thing—using race in a way so that you could stuff black voters into as few districts as possible and then take them out of the regular political discussion.
After a 3-judge panel in district court ruled that was unconstitutional because of the way they used race, they went back—and what is pending in the 3-judge panel now—and said okay, we didn’t do it because of race, but even though we did, you say that we can’t use race. So what we will use is political performance as a proxy for race. They didn’t say that, but that’s effectively what they did, by saying that if you perform by over a certain percent Democratic, then we will put you in these districts. So, they create the same number of districts with almost the same racial population—took it down a little bit—but again, stuffing all the minorities into two or three districts in the state out of thirteen. I have to believe that race is playing some role in your decisions on these other election bills, since on the most important one—that is what the districts are going to look like when your decisions are made what the overall election process will be and what the policy will be where you’ve considered race—I’ve got to believe that you’re considering it in other ways too.”
Section 33: 53:42 – 54:32 (0:50)
MG: “I guess that leads me to a more broader look—which is, you’ve talked about voting rights, you’ve talked about gerrymandering, you’ve talked about House Bill 2, which just passed. All put together, the Republican majority that North Carolina has right now—the supermajority—is making an incredibly permanent mark on the state regarding minority rights. As an African-American, it obviously hits home at a deeper level to you. Are you concern about the future of democracy in North Carolina, particularly with the long-term impact that it’ll have with regard to voting rights and affecting minority groups?”
Section 34: 54:32 – 58:53 (4:21)
DB: “I am. And you’d like for me to explain that. [chuckles] I am concerned about it. It took decades for North Carolina to earn the reputation as a moderate, forward-looking, progressive Southern state. It almost had unique reputation among the states of the old Confederacy. The state is changing pretty rapidly too, so it will evolve back to that posture at some point and that’s part of the reason there was such a sense of urgency in doing it. The state’s population is changing. It’s urbanizing much more rapidly than many of the other Southern states, but ironically enough, the fellow for whom the school that you’re a student in, one time told me that when he was running for governor—that is, Terry Sanford—he realized in the early 60s or the late 50s when he started formulating his plan to run—now, understand the context of this. Central High School in Little Rock, [Arkansas], was on the front on the TV stories and the newspapers in 1957 when [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower had to send federal troops and National Guard to get black students enrolled at a high school in Little Rock. It’s on all of the TV stations and as a five or six-year old, I’m watching and the same scenario played out throughout those early years before Kennedy became president or Sanford became governor—the same year that John F. Kennedy became president.
He told me much later on, ‘You know, you realize that North Carolina was a Southern state. You could dig so deep, but if you didn’t stop there, you would dig up the same stuff that was prevailing in the other Southern states.’ And some of us decided that we could dig just to the surface of it and not wake up this sleeping monster and we could make this a much more progressive state. We could improve the education system, we could do a whole lot of things—the business system and stuff like that. From the late 50s, early 60s onward, North Carolina had—and some of the universities had done it earlier because of the leadership at UNC Chapel Hill; a fellow named Frank Porter Graham had changed the mindset over there in the 40s.
So anyhow, we start out on a course of making this state different than the other Southern states [and] the other states of the old Confederacy. What I see now and the reason I’m so concerned about it setting back not just black voting rights, but a sense of moving forward and looking to the future, is that in many of the policies that are being adopted by this supermajority, the state is now looking more like Mississippi and some of the other deep Southern states that had a very bad history with regards to civil rights, black voting rights, and those kinds of things. I’m finding that they are making us look more like those states than historically we’ve looked and for the first time in a long time—I mean, for six days running we’ve been on the front page of the New York Times, Washington Post, west-coast papers, midwestern papers, the major papers, the major broadcast outlets as a state that’s intolerant. A state that’s trying to turn the clock back and discriminate against a whole class of people and that’s not a traditional position that North Carolina has been in.
So yeah, I’m concerned as to how they will continue to try to cut back on African-American voting rights, so that they can implement these “by-gone policies,” sort of longing for a time that never really existed. So I’m concerned about it.”
Section 35: 58:53 – 59:32 (0:39)
MG: “Just lastly, as an African-American, someone who—you talked about going out at Duke to register people back in 1972 and now fast forward to 2016—can you, having all of the experiences that you’ve had from being African-American to be involved in politics for so long, explain to people and can you demonstrate to people what the significance of a vote is? What does it represent? What does it represent in government and democracy to you and what should it represent to the people who want it?
Section 36: 59:32 – 1:3:18 (3:46)
DB: “The other rights mean very little if you don’t have a right to vote because again, human nature is whatever’s necessary to preserve power or to force your will upon people—that’s one of the instincts of human nature. I say that voting is the most important of all the rights we have in this democracy because that’s the only check on people acting in these sort of natural, human ways sometimes. There are things that moderate that instinct. We are more civilized now than we were a thousand years ago or five hundred years ago, but just as you can have some of the instincts of fear and all of those that we saw 75 or 80 years ago going into World War II, those instincts can still be activated in people. So, if you don’t have an active voting effort convincing people that their voice does matter, that they can moderate some of these crazy positions or different positions that they might see, then you will tend to lose these other liberties that the right to vote protects. They might not be instantly, but over time, you will tend to lose those liberties, whether it’s free speech, whether it’s 4th Amendment rights of unreasonable searches and seizures, whether it’s 5th Amendment rights to counsel or due process, or 6th or 7th or 8th or 9th, even 10th Amendment rights of the states and what have you.
You’ve got to understand that it was the right to vote, ultimately, that moved whether it was the court or the Congress to expand what those various rights under the Constitution mean. Some of the unnamed rights, whether they come under the penumbra of certain rights, are rights that come with the right to vote as you mature over time and try to give meaning to a living document: the Constitution. I think that you can convince people—in fact, we have. It’s not that the people’s right to vote has been totally defeated. They know that they’ve got that. I challenge us to show them what difference that vote means and why if you don’t exercise it, these other things will happen. That’s always a challenge, to show people that you articulate some of things that they think are important and if they don’t support you with voting, their articulation of those ideas will not be present as they are being debated or the viewpoints that they might hold are not going to have any expression with the people who finally prevail. I think that there’s always a challenge to getting people to vote. Again, I said that in America, and North Carolina was even bad in America, the participation rate is less or has been historically less than it is in other civilized countries, especially western countries.
So our challenge is to get everybody to participate and you get them to participate by showing them that their participation means something—that it’s registering with you as you try to represent them or who you’re trying to convince them to vote for. We’ll continue to do that. I started it 50 years ago as a high school student and I’ll be doing it 50 years from now as an old man on a cane.”
Section 37: 1:3:18 – 1:3:34 (0:16)
CS: “I have one last question for you too. So in your speech on July 25, you mentioned that American was founded on the “innocent until proven guilty” notion and that House Bill 589 is more of a guilty until proven innocent—“
Section 38: 1:3:34 – 1:3:38 (0:04)
DB: “Well it is, as far as this fraud and all of the other stuff—some kind of ‘crooked voting.’”
Section 39: 1:3:38 – 1:3:42 (0:04)
CS: “Can you explain that to me, [as in] what you mean by that?”
Section 40: 1:3:42 – 1:4:56 (1:14)
DB: “Well, it was an analogy that I was trying to make. They assume that American voters or North Carolina voters are crooks. That they are engaging in fraudulent elections. That they are going out, recruiting people to vote who aren’t eligible or qualified to vote. There’s no evidence of that and so I’m saying that if that is basically the premise upon which you are building all of this law—to keep people from committing fraud and voting—then come forth with some evidence that there is some fraud in voting. Not just casting a dispersion on all of these folk—and you’re aiming it at primarily minorities.
The examples that they were giving in committee and on the floor were people that they said—and young folk—were people who were registering to vote who weren’t who they said they were, who were registering to vote that weren’t qualified and eligible to vote. There’s no evidence to support that, so if it’s a fundamental right, which is a right to vote, assume that everybody’s qualified to do it and take it upon yourself to disqualify them, rather than disqualifying them and putting the burden on them to qualify themselves. That was the simple proposition that I was trying to get to.”
Section 41: 1:4:56 – 1:5:00 (0:04)
CS: “That’s awesome. Is there anything else that we missed or that we didn’t get to?”
Section 42: 1:5:00 – 1:5:18 (0:18)
DB: “No, you guys do good interviews. You ought to shorten me in my responses. You’ll cover a lot more territory, but you’re getting feel for it and substantively, you’ve got a sense of what the issue really is. So that’s what I would add.”
