The 2008 presidential election had the most diverse electorate in American history. Following this jump in voter participation, new election restrictions emerged in legislatures across the country — and a recent documentary explored the effects.
Students, faculty and local community members gathered Thursday at the UNC School of Law for a screening of the 2019 documentary "Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook." Attendees heard from a subsequent panel discussion on voting rights in North Carolina sponsored by the law school's chapter of the American Constitution Society.
The panel featured Tim Smith, the film's executive producer, political science professor Andrew Reynolds, law professor Gene Nichol and Tomas Lopez, executive director of Democracy NC.
“What the film does is a chronological narrative that basically tells the story of the ways in which gerrymandering, unregulated money in politics, voting restrictions and attacks on the Judiciary have blended together to both restrict access the political process and make participation in the political part process less effective,” Lopez said.
Lopez said efforts to suppress voting specifically target communities of color.
"Rigged" follows the tactics to limit voter turnout among people of color and young voters following the 2008 presidential election. The film covers a number of events in North Carolina leading up to and surrounding the 2016 election including House Bill 589, the work of the Voter Integrity Project and voter purges in Cumberland country.
“Basically, we went out in 2016 during the fall to find out what the real problem was — voter suppression or voter fraud,” Smith said. “We spent some time in North Carolina with the Voter Integrity Project, and they were looking for voter fraud, and low and behold, they found none. But we found lots of examples of voter suppression.”
Following the documentary screening, Smith moderated a discussion with panelists covering topics like the history of voter suppression, current issues in the state and the future of democracy.
“We have witnessed in North Carolina in the last 10 years the astonished war in this country against African Americans, waged from a white people’s government, an all white set of caucuses in the North Carolina legislature,” Nichol said. “It has been done in our names, and it’s one of the most powerful transgressions in modern times against the American Constitutional promise.”
