Just a day before the presidential election, the North Carolina Republican Party issued a press release that celebrated the underperforming voter turnout among African Americans in the state.
"North Carolina Obama Coalition Crumbling," the statement read. "As a share of Early Voters, African Americans are down 6.0%, (2012: 28.9%, 2016: 22.9%) and Caucasians are up 4.2%, (2012: 65.8%, 2016: 70.0%)."
The North Carolina Republican Party has been widely criticized this election year for its efforts in suppressing the minority vote in the state. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in July that the state’s voter ID laws “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
In October, the NAACP filed a lawsuit alleging that local elections boards in five states, including North Carolina, had illegally purged thousands of black voters from registration lists.
These legal quagmires have seemingly failed to alarm GOP leaders in North Carolina.
"The vaulted Clinton ground game has been buried in North Carolina by the Republican effort, thus far," the statement boasted today.
Last week, Reuters reported that emails between North Carolina Republicans revealed a conspiracy to limit the operating hours of early voting polling places, in the hopes it would limit minority turnout.
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