After dropping Nick off at school downtown, my precinct is on the way back home so I figured I’d pop in and vote in the primary being held today.

What I wasn’t expecting was to find a cameraman from Time Warner Cable News INSIDE THE BUILDING blocking the door to the polling room and then keeping the camera pointed at me the entire time I was in there and going through the voting procedures.

Can we say that was more than a little bit AWKWARD?

I’m not ashamed of being seen voting…in fact, I’d be far more ashamed of not casting a ballot even knowing that I live in the state with what is arguably the most gerrymandered House districts in the nation. The old 1st and 12th districts were so egregious that the whole map had to be redrawn when they were ruled unconstitutional earlier this year even though they had been blessed by the DOJ five years prior as being compliant with the Voting Rights Act.

That is why we’re wasting all of this money on redrawn districts and this primary in the first place! But whatever…even though the candidates on offer in our elections are generally of appallingly low quality and have been bought and paid for by people and corporations with enough money to ensure my views and interests will never be properly represented, I still vote. There’s a few Purple Hearts that came to this house from Florida earlier this year I’d have a hard time looking at if I didn’t.

Also, I could care less about the media’s views on how I voted but I was still pretty sure that what the cameraman was doing was at best unwise in a precinct where that camera could be grounds for allegations of voter intimidation if not being outright illegal. Being a photographer myself, I like to stay current on the laws…particularly those restricting two of my favourite activities: freedom of expression and photography! ??

The truly scary aspect of this is that neither the polling place volunteers or the person answering the phones at the county BOE office had a clue that the NC General Statutes is unusually clear on this issue…one would think they should at least know the law they are supposed to enforce to ensure the integrity of the vote!

So as a public service to our friends at BOE…here’s the relevant statute:

NC General Statutes § 163 – 166.3. Limited access to the voting enclosure.

(b) Photographing Voters Prohibited.
No person shall photograph, videotape, or otherwise record the image of any voter within the voting enclosure, except with the permission of both the voter and the chief judge of the precinct. If the voter is a candidate, only the permission of the voter is required.