It’s Time for Americans to Take Back the Vote
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by Eric Holder
When students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the largest historically black public college in the country, go to vote this fall, half of them will be voting in the state’s Sixth Congressional District and the other half will be voting in the 13th Congressional District.
If a student moves from one campus dorm to another, they could be forced to register to vote in a completely different congressional district.
Until 2016, the school’s predominantly African-American student body voted in the state’s 12th Congressional District. But after federal courts found that Republicans had illegally divvied up North Carolina’s congressional map by race–including in the 12th District–to help ensure that the party would have far greater power than its voter support would merit, Republican state legislators crafted a new congressional map based on partisanship instead. One result of their effort was to divide the North Carolina A&T campus in half, cracking the school community and leaving the students with diminished voting power.
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