In NC’s early voting, Democratic turnout down, but leads Republicans
RALEIGH —
More Democrats have taken part in early voting in North Carolina than Republicans by a double-digit margin, but the number of Democrats who have voted is lower than it was at this point four years ago.
As of Tuesday morning, 43.7 percent of votes cast were by Democrats, and 31.2 percent were from Republicans. During the same period in 2012, 49 percent of the votes that had been cast were by Democrats and 31 percent were by Republicans.
The biggest factor in the drop in Democrats voting is relatively low turnout among African-Americans, said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College who has been tracking the polls daily.
“In 2008, African-American voters flipped to being early voters,” Bitzer said. “What you have so far is registered black voters down 15 percent from their same-day totals in 2012. That is going to have an impact on overall Democratic turnout.”
So far, 22.4 percent of early voters identified as African-American, 71.2 percent identified as white and 6.2 percent identified as “other.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article111851272.html#storylink=cpy
The main reason for African-American turnout being down in NC is because the state significantly cut the number of early voting places in African-American communities: voter suppression measures imposed by 17 Republican-controlled county boards of elections who shuttered all but a single voting site per county (or, in giant Mecklenburg County’s case, cut from 22 sites in 2012 to just 4 in 2016).
http://www.insight-us.org/blog/african-american-early-voting-is-way-down-in-north-carolina-why-is-that/
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