Thread by @lekhashupeck

Yesterday, before the 3:30pm Redistricting Committee meeting we were told by NCGA staff that "a lot of people" were already signed up to speak this morning at the public hearing on criteria.

How is this possible if the sign up firm didn't go public until after 4pm? #ncpol

The obvious implication is that Republican leadership of the committee had released this information to selected people well before it came public, effectively filling up most if not all of the 60 speaking slots with their ideological compatriots.

This is further substantiated by the fact that we were also told by staff that it was Sen. Paul Newton (co-Chair of the committee) whose legislative assistant was the one who collected the names of speakers before the public sign up was released.

Before 3:30pm yesterday there was absolutely no public notice of speaker sign up for this morning and no indication given that formal sign up beforehand would be required

If the 60 people who are allowed to speak this morning all say that legislators should be allowed to do whatever they want wrt redistricting and the criteria proposed are awesome, I can't see any other explanation but this subterfuge

Hoping that whatever journalists are covering redistricting this year (@will_doran? @TravisFain?) see fit to cover this absolute travesty

The plain fact is that the vast majority of people in this state - over 70% in every poll I've ever seen - don't approve of the many egregious gerrymanders the past decade. The vast majority of the people of this state do not approve of how the NCGA handles redistricting.

If NCGA leadership wants to play dirty tricks to make it appear that people think they're doing an excellent job well... Everyone knows that it is a farce, because everyone knows that's not true

However, this is the first public hearing of the 2021 North Carolina redistricting process and it's an indication of how Republican leadership plans to conduct itself

So expect more dirty tricks, false transparency that reveals nothing, and "public input" stocked with Republican loyalists - you know, the same tactics of petty authoritarian leaders in countries without democracy as their system of government