Republican Voter Suppression Well Underway in Alabama, North Carolina

Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts in Alabama and North Carolina are proceeding apace, thanks to the Republican Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder).

Alabama:  

On Sept. 30, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced that a budget cut of $11 million would force it to close 31 part-time driver's licensing offices across the state. [snip]

While the number of office closures was less dramatic than what the ALEA had threatened in August, when the state legislature was still working out its budget, the state's voter identification requirement for elections means that some eligible voters could be disenfranchised if they are unable to travel far beyond their county to obtain a license. Moreover, many of the areas that will now lack a part-time driver's license office are very low-income, majority African-American counties.

North Carolina:

A data-mining analysis of information publicly available from the North Carolina State Board of Elections has uncovered apparently systematic irregularities in voter registration efforts which are required of the state by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA; the so-called 'Motor Voter Act'). These irregularities, potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of poverty-level North Carolina citizens, have all occurred during the Republican administration of North Carolina's current governor, Pat McCrory (R).

Under McCrory (who took office in January of 2013), North Carolina has become the tip of the GOP's spear in efforts to suppress voting by demographic groups which typically do not lean Republican (blacks, Latinos, youth, and the economically disadvantaged). McCrory's efforts culminated in 2013 with his signing into law of the nation's single most draconian voter suppression bill, The Voter Information Verification Act... [snip]

Today, North Carolina's voter registration rolls are missing some 40,000 or more poverty-level citizens (and still counting), due to what may prove to be systematic actions by the McCrory administration, in possible violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. To put that number of voters in perspective: in the 2014 election, Thom Tillis (R) beat incumbent Kay Hagan (D) for his current U.S. Senate seat by roughly the same number - just 45,608 votes.

Jim Crow is alive and well in the Republican South.  Maybe "Democracy" sounds too much like "Democrats" to them.