Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Loretta King, has overruled the voters in Kinston, Sout Carolina after they voted overwhelmingly to do away with party affiliation of candidates in local elections. Banana Republic here we come.

The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

From the Washington Times.

The measure appeared to have broad support among both white and black voters, as it won a majority in seven of the city’s nine black-majority voting precincts and both of its white-majority precincts.

But before nonpartisan elections could be implemented, the city had to get approval from the Justice Department.

In a letter dated Aug. 17, the city received the Justice Department’s answer: Elections must remain partisan because the change’s “effect will be strictly racial.”

“Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office,” Loretta King, who at the time was the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the city.

Ms. King wrote that voters in Kinston vote more along racial than party lines and without the potential for voting a straight Democratic ticket, “the limited remaining support from white voters for a black Democratic candidate will diminish even more.”

Ms. King is the same official who put a stop to the New Black Panther Party case. In that case, the Justice Department filed a civil complaint in Philadelphia after two members of the black revolutionary group dressed in quasi-military garb stood outside a polling place on election last year and purportedly intimidated voters with racial insults, slurs and a nightstick.

After a judge ordered a default judgments against the Panthers, who refused to answer the charges or appear in court, the Justice Department dropped the charges against all but one of the defendants, saying “the facts and the law did not support pursuing” them.

Ms. King’s letter in the Kinston case states that because of the low turnout black voters must be “viewed as a minority for analytical purposes,” and that “minority turnout is relevant” to determining whether the Justice Department should be allowed a change to election protocol.

Black voters account for 9,702 of the city’s 15,402 registered voters but typically don’t vote at the rates whites do.

As a result of the low turnout, Ms. King wrote, “black voters have had limited success in electing candidates of choice during recent municipal elections.”

“It is the partisan makeup of the general electorate that results in enough white cross-over to allow the black community to elect a candidate of choice,” she wrote.

Dr. Zero Weighs In

Today we learned the astonishing story of the Justice Department’s intervention in Kinston, North Carolina, where voters had decided to dispense with party affiliation for local candidates. The DOJ ruled that party affiliation was necessary because black voters could only select their “candidates of choice” if those candidates were clearly labeled as Democrats, and that Kinston’s white voters would only vote for a black candidate if they knew he was a Democrat.

To call this outrageous on several levels is like saying “The Exorcist” is a somewhat disturbing movie.