Monday, January 2, 2017

Professor Declares North Carolina an Authoritarian State




If you think liberal hysteria has reached record decibels at the national level then you haven’t seen the screeching hair fire that’s going on in North Carolina.  Our state’s General Assembly has been under attack since republicans gained power in 2010.  Regional rags have moved the arms on the Dooms Day clock to two minutes to midnight. 

A recent op-ed emblazoned the following headline, North Carolina is no longer considered a democracy.  This bit of drama was written by a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.  His bio reads thus: Andrew Reynolds has consulted in over 25 nations on issues of democratic design since 1991. His most recent book is The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford). He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We all know academia has reached an all new low, but the following rhetoric is beyond the pale.  Here is an excerpt from our regional Disturbers:


In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Is this guy serious?  North Carolina ranks below Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone?  And he teaches at a respected university?  Wow!

First of all, I would like to inform Professor Reynolds that North Carolina, along with fifty other states, is a constitutional republic.  The U.S. Constitution specifically dictates and guarantees that.  We are not a democracy and thank God for it.

So what has this professor’s panties in a bunch?  According to this fool, the criteria that ranked us with dictators and failed states are redistricting, voter registration, a legislature that exercises its prerogatives and a recent phenomenon: transgender rights.



It’s hard to believe a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill is unaware of the history of North Carolina’s First and 12th Congressional Districts.  I can attest to it because I live in it. And I can say without hesitation that my neighborhood has been in and out of the 12th since I moved here in 1994.  As a matter of fact, the First and 12th Congressional Districts were drawn by Democrats in 1991; its legitimacy was contested in 1992 in the United States District Court.  Shaw v Reno went all the way to the Supreme Court.  Here is an excerpt from A History of African Americans in North Carolina:

The chief justice chided the state for using race as a “predominant consideration.”  The state did not deny the criticism.  It created two majority-minority districts to comply with the VRA and the demands of the Justice Department.  Rehnquist objected to the purported premise of North Carolina’s reapportionment plan, namely, that the General Assembly could draw a district anywhere in the state to overcome the violations of the VRA.  “We find this position singularly unpersuasive,” he concluded.

These districts have been contested since its inception.  How can this be a surprise to a political science professor?  His specious arguments don’t end there.  Professor Reynolds believes North Carolina tried to disenfranchise voters by eliminating same-day registration.  I would like to inform this academic that only 16 states have passed this law which 12 have enacted.  The real disenfranchisement is leveled against responsible citizens who registered months in advance of an election.  Many of these SDR ballots are fraudulent.  The Civitas Institute proved that after the 2008 general election.

This professor should be ashamed of himself.  But we all know liberals are incapable of self-reflection.  To them, the ends justify the means and the truth is hyperbole.    

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