MINORITY RULES

LETTER FROM NORTH CAROLINA | The once fringe legal theory that became a threat to democracy.

- ANDREW MARANTZ

An extreme version of the theory could give state legislatures the power to award Electoral College votes however they see fit.

The Museum of the Albemarle, on the eastern shore of North Carolina, is a spacious building the color of sand and sea glass. It’s in Elizabeth City, about as far from the Research Triangle as Baltimore is from New York City, but you can get there and back in the same day if you know how to drive fast without getting pulled over. “There are a hundred counties in this state, and I’ve spent time in every one,” Sailor Jones, a democracy activist, told me this past fall, on his way to speak at the museum. He was a skillful multitasker—sipping from a huge fountain Coke, tweaking a Rihanna-heavy playlist, and taking call after call on speakerphone, all while bombing his Toyota 4Runner down an empty stretch of highway bisecting a cotton farm. Jones is forty-eight, with sandy hair and a round face; he grew up in northeastern North Carolina, a rural, working- class part of the state. “When I tell people I was born in a tobacco field, I’m only exaggerating, like, a tiny bit,” he said. He is white, but he’s from a county that is, like Elizabeth City, majority Black. “If you’re used to the powers that be either passively ignoring you or actively screwing you over, for generations, it’s natural to hear about some new nefarious thing they’re up to and think, Same shit, different day,” he said. “The challenge for us, messaging-wise, is to find a way to tell folks, You’re not wrong, but, also, this one really is different.”