Why is DOGE grabbing all this data, anyway?
After Republican- Pat McCrory's 2012 gubernatorial victory gave Republicans control of all three branches of govern ment, the state GOP tried to lock in its dominance for the long haul. Armed with the governorship, both legislative chambers, and a majority on the state Supreme Court, Republican leaders launched an ambitious string of reforms designed to skew the political game. They began by demanding access to background data on voters across the state. With this information in hand, the legislature passed a series of electoral reforms making it harder for voters to cast their ballots. They passed a strict voter ID law, reduced opportunities for early voting, ended preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, eliminated same-day registration, and slashed the number of polling places in several key counties. New data allowed the Republicans to design the reforms to target African American voters, as a federal appeals court put it, with "almost surgical precision." And when an appeals court suspended the execution of the new laws, Republicans used their control of the state's election boards to implement several of them anyway.