Watering down the meeting minutes in Watauga was unacceptable

Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, August 22, 2013.

Watauga County’s election board’s chief should have more sense than to water-down the minutes of a contentious meeting, but that is, unbelievably, what he did.

Out in the mountains, folks play politics with sharpened elbows, and those elbows were flying at an Aug. 12 meeting when the Republican-controlled Board of Elections ap-proved new voting sites. They eliminated one at Appalachian State University and crowded as many as 9,300 voters into a site. Critics saw eliminating the site at Appalachian was another attempt to suppress Democratic turnout, although supporters said the ASU site had accessibility issues.

The board chairman heightened the controversy when he requested a watered-down version of the minutes. The Journal’s Bertrand M. Gutierrez obtained all three versions of the Aug. 12 minutes through a public-records request, and it seems clear that chairman Luke Eggers sought to keep embarrassing comments out of the public record.

His attempt didn’t work. Instead, it’s just fired up more controversy, especially since the full meeting was already on YouTube.

Eggers, backed by his Republican ally on the board, Bill Aceto, apparently tried to hide some of the meeting’s dialogue by sanitizing the official minutes. If Eggers and Aceto are certain of the rightness of their actions, they did not need to attempt to hide any of the conversation that took place on Aug. 12 and that was recorded in the original draft of the minutes. But, given the nature of the conversation, in which Eggers was questioned about his motives and a possible conflict of interest, it is certainly understandable that he didn’t support full transparency in the official document.

And it is full transparency that the public deserves.

Somebody should mount a legal challenge to the minutes issue. If that happens, Eggers will have some explaining to do.