north carolina

April 8, 2020 - Calls have grown louder for states to allow more voting by mail as the coronavirus pandemic spreads. North Carolina recently made it harder to request an absentee ballot in response to fraud in a congressional race, but a group that works with black voters wants a court to strike down the changes as discriminatory.  

March 24, 2020 - The campaign laid off hundreds of staffers this month, despite its promises to keep them employed through the November election. Now several organizers who worked in states including Florida and Georgia are suing.

March 6, 2020 - The 2016 election made it clear that neither political party was going to invest in rural Southern communities for the long haul. So the people living there decided to do it themselves.

February 26, 2020 - Ruling that a 2018 voter ID law could disenfranchise black voters, the North Carolina Court of Appeals put it on hold last week. A federal court had already blocked the law through the state's primaries, and this latest decision means it's likely to be blocked through November.

February 20, 2020 - Raising Wages NC held a people's hearing about the difficulty of living under North Carolina's $7.25 hourly minimum wage. Workers shared their stories of hardship and called on elected officials and candidates for state office to support a wage hike. 

February 13, 2020 - Supreme courts in every other Southern state have addressed the problem of racist jury selection. But in the decades since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such discrimination unconstitutional, North Carolina courts have turned away every claim.

January 28, 2020 - With Southern states' monopoly electric utilities clinging to a business model that's worsening the climate crisis, polluting the environment, and costing consumers dearly, there's growing interest in opening markets to competition. While a ballot initiative to end Florida's electricity monopoly was recently rejected by the state Supreme Court, there are efforts underway to end Virginia's monopoly system and to study the question in the Carolinas.