We may have entered the twilight zone for democracy in North Carolina. Just as the state is preparing for the November election, the federal government last week dropped a bombshell of a subpoena on 44 eastern North Carolina county boards of elections and the State Board of Elections. The order: Turn over all ballots, poll books, absentee ballot requests, registration applications and other election related documents since 2010. Do so by Sept. 25. That’s was a request for 20 million voting records to be turned over inside a month. While federal officials have pushed their deadline back to after the election, it is by any standard a massive and expensive request. This incredible demand is traced to ICE, the federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency. It comes after a federal grand jury’s indictment against 19 foreign nationals for possible voter fraud in our state during the 2016 election.
Nineteen people who may have voted illegally. Nineteen people out of 4.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 election. Nineteen people who range in ages from 30’s to 70’s and come from countries in Europe, South America and Asia. That is 0.0004% of all those who voted in 2016. Is this what widespread voter fraud looks like?
And does 19 individuals possibly voting illegally in the 2016 election really warrant the subpoena of millions of voting records going back to 2010?
Apparently so for ICE, the U.S. Attorney’s office in eastern North Carolina, the state legislative leadership who’ve remained silent and some of our Republican congressional representatives who seem to think the feds don’t need to be questioned about any of this.
Full Article: BOB PHILLIPS: Has North Carolina become democracy’s twilight zone? :: WRAL.com.