Welcome Aboard "Ameri-Cubans"
Welcome, Americans of North Carolina! Cuba will be happy to take you as our very first 'Satellite State of Cuba'. We will call you 'Ameri-Cuba'. First though, you must send us All your New cars, and We will send You All of our Junkers. Also, send All of your useless Politicians, actually ALL of your Politicians, to South Carolina so that we can soon make That state our Second 'Satellite State of Cuba'. Welcome aboard Ameri-Cubans! Thank you... Much! 
Welcome, Americans of North Carolina! Cuba will be happy to take you as our very first 'Satellite State of Cuba'. We will call you 'Ameri-Cuba'. First though, you must send us All your New cars, and We will send You All of our Junkers. Also, send All of your useless Politicians, actually ALL of your Politicians, to South Carolina so that we can soon make That state our Second 'Satellite State of Cuba'. Welcome aboard Ameri-Cubans! Thank you... Much!
Bienvenido a bordo de los "Ameri-Cubanos"!
Bienvenidos, los norteamericanos de Carolina del Norte. Cuba estará encantada de hacer de usted nuestro primer "Estado Satélite de Cuba". Te llamaremos 'Ameri-Cuba'. Primero sin embargo, usted debe enviarnos todos sus coches nuevos, y en vuelta enviaremos todos nuestros Junkers. Además, envía a todos tus políticos inútiles, en realidad TODOS tus políticos, a Carolina del Sur para que pronto podamos hacer de ese estado nuestro segundo "Estado Satélite de Cuba" Bienvenido a bordo de los "Ameri-Cubanos"! Muchas gracias! ;)
North Carolina’s Democracy Ranked On Par With Cuba
The state barely counts as a democracy anymore, says an electoral integrity report.
North Carolina politics have been messy, to say the least. Capping off a year of power struggles, the narrow defeat of Gov. Pat McCrory (R) led to a legislative backlash that drew widespread criticism for undermining the democratic process itself.
In fact, a new report from the Electoral Integrity Project says that North Carolina should no longer be classified as a “fully functioning democracy,” a lead EIP researcher wrote in the Raleigh News & Observer.
The report points to three main flaws in North Carolina’s political system: extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression of black and brown residents, and the usurpation of incoming governor Roy Cooper’s power through hasty legislation.
“If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table ― a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world,” UNC-Chapel Hill political scientist Andrew Reynolds wrote in Thursday’s op-ed.
The EIP is a nonpartisan project that grades democracies worldwide on a 100-point scale. The gradings are based on multiple factors including voter access to polling sites, the influence of state-controlled media and the potential that an election has been rigged.
For this year’s election, North Carolina received a score of 58/100, Reynolds wrote. That’s in the same neighborhood as the governments of Cuba, Sierra Leone and Indonesia.
Patsy Keever, chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, agrees that her state’s current efforts at governing do not adhere to democratic principles.
“Senator [Phil] Berger and Speaker [Tim] Moore are power hungry leaders whose number one goal is to protect their power no matter the cost,” Keever said in a statement to The Huffington Post, referring to the state’s Senate leader and House speaker.
“Since 2010, the NC GOP has systematically engaged in a dangerous partisan political agenda, making it harder for people to vote, changing the nature of the State Board of Elections and stripping an incoming Democratic governor of power,” she said. “That’s not what democracy looks like ― and North Carolinians deserve better.”
The flaws in North Carolina’s democratic system predate this year’s election, according to the EIP report. The Republican-controlled legislature racially gerrymandered its own district lines to such a degree in 2011 that a federal court struck down the electoral map as unconstitutional on Nov. 29 and ordered the state to hold special elections in 2017. The EIP concluded that the state of North Carolina had the least democratic redistricting in the world.
“There is nowhere in the world outside of America that allows politicians to change the district lines to this degree; it’s a recipe for disaster,” Reynolds told HuffPost. “You’ve got voters locked into a system where they’re unable to change the power dynamics of the state, regardless how they vote.”
The North Carolina GOP has also been accused of suppressing black voters, which drew a lawsuit from the state NAACP in October. Thousands of voter registrations, most belonging to black residents, were canceled with less than a week left before the election.
Access to voting is a key principle of democracy, one that North Carolina directly attempted to undermine, Reynolds said.
But the most blatant move by the North Carolina Republicans to maintain their power came in two laws hastily passed since the gubernatorial election. On Monday, McCrory signed HB 17, which undercuts the power of the incoming governor by requiring Cooper’s Cabinet picks to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate and cutting the number of state officials he can appoint. Late last week, McCrory signed SB 4, which increases the number of people on the North Carolina Board of Elections from five to eight, half to be chosen by the governor and half by the legislature ― thereby ensuring an even party split and an effective deadlock on voting matters.
The EIP took all these factors into account when assessing North Carolina and concluded that maintaining party power had taken precedence over adhering to true democratic principles.
How can North Carolina ― and the United States as a whole ― turn this around? Reynolds had two suggestions to start: An independent entity should be assigned to draw more fair and representative districts, and voting rights advocates must continue the legal battle against voter suppression in the federal courts.
“If we know the elections are deeply flawed, and we see all these other puzzle pieces ... it adds up to a deep atrophy of democracy that is no longer worth its name,” Reynolds said. “We claim to be the greatest democracy in the world, but if you look at the symptoms, it’s pretty sick.”
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