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Professor: North Carolina Is NO LONGER A DEMOCRACY Because Republicans Win Too Many Elections
[DAILYCALLER] A taxpayer-funded political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has concluded that political conditions in North Carolina are comparable to political conditions in totalitarian nations such as Cuba, Venezuela and Iran because Republicans are too politically successful.

The professor, Andrew Reynolds, aired his 936-word grievance last week in The News & Observer, a newspaper out of Raleigh.
I bet it didn't bother him much when the Democrats won virtually every election in that state for a hundred twenty years after the civil war.
North Carolina "can no longer be classified as a full democracy," Reynolds declares, because the statewide Republican Party has been too successful at winning the state’s winner-take-all elections.

The winner-take-all system -- which is excessively common throughout the United States -- is a huge problem, Reynolds pontificates, because "one party wins just half the votes but 100 percent of the power." North Carolina Republicans have won so many elections in recent years that they have "a huge legislative majority" and "absolute veto-proof control."

The professor blames gerrymandered voting districts in the state for creating "rigged district boundaries" and making state politicians "beholden to their party bosses" and "detached from democratic accountability."

Reynolds also says North Carolina "can no longer be classified as a full democracy" because of a state transgender bathroom law -- commonly called House Bill 2 -- which requires people to use public bathrooms aligning with the genitalia with which they were originally born.

There are "an estimated 38,000 transgender Tar Heels," the professor writes, and "democracies do not limit their citizens’ rights on the basis of their born identities."
That's strange: I thought democracies limited citizen rights on a daily basis so as to allow all citizens to have an equal measure of rights.
Still further, North Carolina "can no longer be classified as a full democracy," Reynolds writes, because state politicians have attempted to enforce legislation requiring voters to present government-issued photo identifications before casting ballots. Such laws, the professor says, are "targeted attempts to reduce African-American and Latino access to the vote."
He's just another garden-variety progressive without an original idea...
The final argument Reynolds makes is that North Carolina "can no longer be classified as a full democracy" because the state’s Republican-led legislature recently passed several laws designed to undercut the power of incoming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

"When, in response to losing the governorship, one party uses its legislative dominance to take away significant executive power, it is a direct attack upon the separation of powers that defines American democracy," Reynolds writes. The hastily-passed laws, which some notable state Republicans have decried, leave "Carolina no better than the authoritarian regimes we look down upon," Reynolds claims.
Posted by: Fred 2017-01-01
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=477221