We talked about how Republicans didn’t want this student to run for city council because he might win:
The state Board of Elections on Tuesday unanimously agreed that an Elizabeth City State University student can run for local office, reversing a decision by the Pasquotank County elections board.
Montravias King registered to run for the Elizabeth City board on July 19 when he was a student at the historically black college in the Pasquotank County seat.
King, a senior who has been active in the local NAACP and other civic activities in his college community, used his on-campus address when he filed to run for office.
Richard “Pete” Gilbert, chairman of the county Republican party, challenged King’s bid, arguing that a dorm address was a temporary residence and disqualified King from seeking a seat in the Elizabeth City ward where his campus home was.
Before the hearing Tuesday, students and voting rights advocates gathered outside board of elections offices in Raleigh to protest what they deemed to be an attempt to squelch the student vote in a state that had the country’s 11th highest turnout in 2012.
It was this summer, after the state legislature adopted broad revisions to elections law, that Gilbert challenged King’s eligibility to seek office.
Gilbert has challenged dozens of Elizabeth City State college students on voter rolls in Pasquotank as having temporary residences that prohibit them from voting in the college town where they spend many months of the year.
Gilbert pointed out Tuesday that he was not challenging King’s eligibility to vote – only his ability to run for office.
Barnett argued that a decision that barred King from running for office in the ward where he lives also, de facto, rendered him ineligible to vote.
The hearing Tuesday was held in a packed meeting room, with media crews training cameras at a state board – two Democrats and three Republicans – appointed to their positions by Gov. Pat McCrory.
“This is a great day for students across North Carolina.” – Montravias King, student and candidate for City Council, Elizabeth City.
Congratulations Montravias King! “Now it is time for you to go on and run for City Council and WIN!” Rev. Barber
Good job, conservatives! You made your opponent a hero.
burnspbesq
Journey of a thousand miles etc. This is a damn good first step.
raven
Rachel!
David Hunt
Well a hero is defined by the villains that he faces, and if there’s on thing Republicans are good at these days, it’s being villains.
opiejeanne
So, if his campus address is ok for him to register to run for office, won’t the same be said of students registering to vote using their campus address?
MomSense
YES!! Montravius!! Wow, this is the best news.
Kay
@raven:
I think you’re right. I saw last week they were all whining about being victimized. That means they’re mad they got caught.
feebog
I think the Elections Board knew they had to dial the outright discrimination back a bit. And yes, kudos to TRMS for shining a lot of light on this issue. Now forward with the lawsuits and full reversal of these odious laws.
raven
@Kay: She certainly played an important role. She’ll be more modest than Lawrence would but she should talk about it.
MomSense
@Kay:
I think we should have a balloon-juice group go volunteer to drive those students to the polls on election day. I did not like the road they have to walk to get to their polling place.
Kay
What can this possibly mean? Is that like a superficial wound?
geg6
Wonderful news! Go Montravius!
Dee Loralei
@raven: Benen already said they’d have more on it during tonight’s show. And more on the Gov. McDonnell dirty bidness as well.
Kay
@MomSense:
I think it’s going to be fine. Everyone always checks “drive voters to the polls” here. For some reason that’s the favorite job. I did it in 2010 and I had this older woman telling me she wasn’t ready and she’d check back later. “Oh, I’ll just wait right here then, by the phone. I have nothing else to do for the next 8 hours but wait on you to put your shoes on”
It was really funny. A funny spot in a disaster of an election day.
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
Very glad.
Fuck you, GOP.
Dee Loralei
@Dee Loralei: Oh, yea, meant to add I think congrats are in order for Montravious! And that means other college kids can register to vote and vote in the elections using their school addresses, so that racist fat bastard who wanted to “take his show on the road” can’t now! Great news for all those kids!
SiubhanDuinne
@MomSense: I’ve already thought I would drive up from Atlanta and just do a shuttle service all day. It would be great if others from neighboring states would do the same.
Kay
@MomSense:
I would like to do poll watching somewhere else than Ohio, but not NC. I think they’ll get plenty of help. Some neglected state that isn’t in any way a swing state. Tennessee. Alaska. It would be fun because then they’d think “God, there are millions of them”
We’re everywhere :)
It wouldn’t even have to be true.
SiubhanDuinne
@opiejeanne: IANAL, but it does seem that the precedent has been set in case there are challenges.
GregB
That Pete Gilbert clown makes a perfect Boss Hogg type of villain too.
Good on Montraivias and good on Rachel and good on Moral Mondays.
The North Carolina GOP is going to get spanked badly by the electorate.
La Caterina (Mrs. Johannes)
Oh God. That’s my hometown. The story makes me cringe but I’m glad the Elizabeth City State students are still standing up to the local wingnuts.
aimai
@Kay: As I was doorknocking for Elizabeth Warren a woman voter opened the door to me and said, wonderingly “I just called to get a ride! My, you are quick!” I had to admit that I wasn’t there to give her the ride, but I was perfectly willing to do it and I did end up taking a few people to the polls later.
shelly
Excellent! Pushback, pushback, pushback!
Helen
So I tried to post a link and it did not work. Anyone who wants to know about a student’s right to vote where they go to school; go to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
They explain it all in their Student Voting Guide
Shorter: Students can vote anywhere they want to, including where they go to school.
Chris
How the fuck can you be qualified to vote inside a certain jurisdiction, but not qualified to run for office in it? (Barring age barriers).
I know that’s what was pointed out to him, but it still boggles my mind that he was ever able to offer that argument with a straight face. Then again, this is coming off of years of shenanigans about Obama’s birth certificate, so I suppose nothing should surprise me at this point. Somehow, it still manages to.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
Oh, this is bad, really bad. If this “student” can run for office, pretty soon those people will be wanting to vote and shit, and run for who knows what. They might be running for the U.S. Senate, or governors’ seats, or even, God forbid, for the presidency itself! And then what hope will we white people, the real Americans, have?
O.K., I’m done channelling these assholes. They really are vile, they really are beneath contempt. These white assholes have had everything handed to them on plates their whole lives, but that isn’t enough, they want to keep everybody else, especially them darkies, from even ever getting a shot at having a tin plate, much less the good stuff that comes on it to rich white people. I know they’re desperate, and that gives me hope, I know that they’re on the losing end of history… But, shit, they really are doing their best to fuck everybody else over but good before they go down.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay:
Yup.
La Caterina (Mrs. Johannes)
@MomSense: We can get some fabulous oysters just down the road after the polls close. I’m in for an election day trip there.
ruemara
W00T! This is the best thing I’ve heard all day.
piratedan
@shelly: agreed, if we’re going to really change things it has to start locally and build from there. This is the kind of crap that these guys have been getting away with for years wherever they can and it’s time to bring their entire house of cards down.
Baud
Glad to see it was unanimous, especially in these cynical times.
Patricia Kayden
Good for Mr. King. Hope we hear more stories like these from North Carolina as Repub anti-voter tactics are challenged.
Pogonip
I’m rooting for the kid.
Chris
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.):
The depressing thing is, they’ve been desperate ever since Abe Lincoln became the Republican front runner in the 1860 presidential election (a person who knows pre-Civil War history better than I do would probably point to even earlier dates).
They have been losing and losing steadily ever since, as evidenced by the skin tone of that guy in the White House. But the amount of damage they manage to do on the way down has been mind-boggling, and will continue to be for some time.
Baud
@Chris:
Teddy Roosevelt and Ike were relatively ok.
Kay
@aimai:
So funny.
I was sitting in the living room during the 2012 election and these two people came to the front door. No one uses the front door, so I didn’t get up and my 19 year old got it. They were looking for him. They were Obama canvassers from Massachusetts. So he doesn’t really talk very much and they’re nice people and they’re talking and he’s smiling and nodding and finally I said “he’s voting for Obama.”
I think they were taken aback, I just blurted it out, but they don’t know him. He’d stand there and smile for a long time before he’d volunteer anything.
rikyrah
It was the obviousness of it all. How this bigot would challenge the students at the Historically Black College, but somehow never managed to challenge the students at the Historically White college. That nobody would make the connection
MomSense
@Kay:
I’ve been thinking about organizing something where we hook up volunteers with frequent flyer miles and places to stay so they can go to states and do poll watching, registration, and voter protection.
I would love to travel but I know I will be busy with our election here.
MomSense
@SiubhanDuinne:
Oh my gosh I remember during the NC primary in 2008 we had buses full of volunteers come in from Atlanta to help us and there were a number of us who got really teary when we saw them pile into our office. It was incredible. There was a group of musicians who would sing and play for us late at night while we made up our walk lists and entered data.
pseudonymous in nc
The Elizabeth City case was open and shut, so it got tossed quickly, but the state BOE upheld the decision by the Watauga County board (Boone / App State) to close the campus early voting location. It’s going to look at the consolidation of precincts in Boone at a later date.
g
What a great story!
Citizen_X
Fucking Klansman. Hah, you lost! Put your hood back on and go slink home.
Gretchen
I wonder how the vote would have gone without tv cameras in the room.
J R in WV
Sounds like Watauga County League of Women Voters needs to file a law suit to make the county board of elections make sure that the potential voting population per precinct ratio is even throughout the county, and that each precinct has the same number of functional voting machines per unit of population.
It would be so sad if all the working voting machines were in white neighborhoods, and the only voting machines they could find for the students and minority precincts were mostly broken as hell. Busturds! I saw the video of those two young bullies trying to run the democrats out of their
private club, er, public meeting of a governmental committee.Those boyos are in over their heads, and have already broken election laws, which probably won’t be prosecuted, but the opposition party committee should be sure that they are made aware of the potential penalties for having private meetings out of the public eye, and not announcing the agenda of business before the scheduled date of any meeting.
Those little would-be storm troopers make my skin crawl. They don’t know what they’re playing with, and if and when it backfires, I hope no one is hurt.