Beaufort's Elections Director jumps into the partisan redistricting lawsuit and refuses to answer questions about why | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    Beaufort's Director of Elections, Kellie Harris Hopkins, has jumped into the highly partisan charged lawsuit against the Legislature's new redistricting process. She did so by filing an affidavit in the lawsuit that has been filed by a number of Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations against the new district plans. Hopkins is a Democrat.

    You can read her affidavit by clicking here. It begins on Page 8 of the download, which includes all four affidavits including the affidavits of three other elections directors.

    Essentially all of them make the argument that the Legislature's plans are bad because some of the boundary line split precincts, or Voting Tabulation Districts (VTD). That's a sound argument. Splitting VTD's makes for more work and expense for elections officials and it is more confusing to the public. No question about that.

    But, it has been that way for nearly fifty years. So why are these people now raising the issue? We think the answer is simple. The Democrats, or Democrat-leaning supporters of the plaintiffs are not happy with the Republican drawn districts. Democrat drawn districts in earlier years also split VTD's. So why is that now a problem and was not under the Democrat plans?

    VTD's are split for one of two reasons: To comply with the One-person, One-vote prescriptions or to comply with the Voting Rights Act. It is just that simple. And every one of these elections officials, including Ms. Hopkins knows this.

    Thus, when they attack the splitting of VTD's they are in effect attacking the Voting Rights Act or the requirement that each district have about as many people in it as any other.

    Now we agree with them that VTD should not be split. We would even agree that precincts should not be split. Heck, we would agree that counties should not be split.

    But we know, and they know that you can't draw districts without splitting some or all of those areas and still meet the requirements of One-person, one vote and the Voting Rights Act. That's like taking a position that the state should apportion the gasoline tax revenue on the basis of the number of miles of roads in a county but then argue that each county should get the same amount of money. Can't be done. One or the other of the variables must be sacrificed.

    Case in point: Ms. Hopkins argues that VTD should not be split and offers the debacle that her poll officials created in 2002 when they gave the wrong ballots to voters because the Edwards precinct was split by two school board districts. But what she does not say is that the reason one of those districts was drawn the way that it was drawn was that it was necessary to get enough votes so the Aurora area would get a representative on the school board and to insure that at least three of the nine districts were predominately minority to insure minority representation. That district snakes through every precinct south of the river in Beaufort County. We heard nothing from Ms. Hopkins in 2002 about trying to get the law changed, either legislatively or judicially. And frankly, we doubt she would actually support abolishing the One-person, one-vote requirement or the Voting Rights Act even now.

    She also knows why Ward 1 was split in Washington in House district 6. To have kept Ward 1 whole would have resulted in either "packing" and/or "diluting" the black vote.

    We would even suggest that Ms. Hopkins would not even support the most logical remedy for her complaints. That is, to re-draw the VTDs such that each contains about the same number of people and about the same percentage of minorities. "Can't be done..." we would anticipate the hue and cry to be.

    And that is precisely our complaint with Ms. Hopkins' position on this lawsuit.

    So why would she take such an irrational position? We asked her.
Here are our questions:

    1. How long, in your experience, have precincts been divided in Beaufort County?

    2. What is the relationship between dividing precincts and the implementation of the Voting Rights Act?

    3. Have you ever officially complained to anyone else (before this filing) about split precincts?

    4. Re. voter ballot identification...what is the difference between relatively few voters on a particular ballot in a precinct and provisional ballots? Why the concern about secrecy in one instance and apparently not in the other?

    5. Would you care to speculate on why less than 10% of the Elections Directors in chose to get into this partisan spitting contest and you were one of them?


    Ms. Hopkins declined to answer our questions. All she would say is that she stood behind her affidavit.

    Commentary

    Being an Elections Director is an inherently political job. Elections are political and most are partisan. All Elections Directors in North Carolina are political appointees. They are selected by local boards of elections that are mandated by law to be predominately of the same party as the Governor.

    We see nothing wrong with that and we see nothing wrong with a director taking partisan positions.

    But we do think they should be consistent. If she opposes split VTD's one year she should oppose them every year unless the circumstances (laws or population) changes. Not just when the opposing political party draws the maps.

    But the most disingenuous part of Ms. Hopkins' position is that she knows what she complains about does not have a legal remedy. So why make a fuss about it nothing can legally be done about it? At the very least she should have acknowledged why the VTD's are split in Beaufort County and what the consequences would be to keeping them whole. But we're confident the court will recognize this.

    But at a minimum, if Ms. Hopkins is going to choose to go partisan in her official positions, she should be willing, when speaking officially, to answer questions about her positions. Her essentially "I have no further comment" is the most egregious part of this whole thing. She had a chance to help educate the public about election laws and systems and she refused to accept that responsibility. That is very unfortunate.