I don't want to get too political anymore but I think there is a reason why this is popping up in the news. Thankfully, nobody is trying to make a huge deal about it but I don't necessarily believe the official reason for why people were removed. The reason, according the North Carolina State Election Commission is mostly because of "change of address without notification." Other reasons included being convicted of a felony, not participating in 2 consecutive federal elections and hidden in the back was a footnote that some were removed because of death and lack of citizenship.
They are kind of dancing around clarifying how many if any of the people removed were non-citizens by not including it as a category at all but instead refer to it as "request from voter" or "other." I suppose their might be some silly law that states they cannot have this category but I don't care enough to look into it.
However, I think it is important to look at how many of the overall eligible voters in this state 750,000 people actually is. There are around 7.5 million voters in North Carolina so warranting the removal of a full 10% of them is kind of a big deal, don't you think?
Now as far as any of us know this could be something that happens every 4 years and it was just never highlighted the way that it is now because of all the vitriol that is getting thrown around in this joke of a Presidential election that we have going on right now. But when you consider that North Carolina is considered a "swing state" and that the elections are normally won by just a few percentage points, the fact that nearly 10% of the registered voters needed to be removed for ineligibility reasons, well that is a pretty big issue.
I'm not saying that people were definitely cheating. I really don't want to jump on that speculation bandwagon but it seems to me that something as important as electing our state and country's leaders would have a whole lot of checks and balances on them. When I see stuff like this happen it just kind of reinforces the idea that I have in my mind that our votes aren't actually counted at all. I mean, would it really surprise me if it was revealed that all of this is just a charade to keep the plebs busy while the overlords just do whatever they want to do?
It would be really nice if the country that is constantly lecturing the rest of the world about freedom and democracy actually did a much better job of ensuring the legitimacy of their own elections first. Perhaps this is a step in the right direction.
I honestly believe that no matter who ends up winning in November that the losing side is going to be claiming that the other side cheated and it would be nice if we had things in place to make sure that something like that couldn't happen. The first time I recall this squabbling over results ever happening was Gore vs. W Bush and it becomes more and more of an issue as the years go by. The United States citizens have very little faith in their government right now and it would be nice if that could change.
For me, I tend to focus more on local elections these days rather than the national or even state-wide ones. I wish more people would do the same. The things that are more likely to effect your life directly are decided by the people that live in your communities yet voter turnout is extremely low (around 20%) for these elections. I'll save that gripe for another day though