Voting is going to look a bit different in North Carolina this year thanks to new partisan observers who will be eyeing voters as they cast ballots when in-person early voting kicks off in October. The new observers are touted as a way to ensure the integrity of the electoral process.

To the Editor:

Savings and Loan Collapse. The year 1982 marked the beginning of supply side economics in which deregulation and tax cuts were viewed as the solution to stimulating corporate growth.

To the Editor:

Present-day political unrest reminds me of the Spanish cellist, conductor and composer, Pav Casals, known in English by his Spanish name, Pablo Casals. Casals was born in El Vendrell, Spain, Dec. 29, 1876. He lived in France after 1936 and Puerto Rico after 1956, where he died, Oct. 22, 1973. 

To the Editor:

On the anniversary of 9/11 you posted an opinion piece titled "GOP becoming a fascist party." Do you ever check the context of quotes used in the opinion pieces you publish or are you so eager to publish anti GOP and Trump comments that facts don't matter? Or is it just a simple matter of laziness? 

To the Editor:

As my grandmother used to say, the MAGA party “doesn’t have the sense it was born with.”  

The MAGA presidential candidate — a multiple-times-bankrupted felon convicted of sexual assault against one woman and of covering up his illicit liaison with another to protect his reputation — has nothing to offer against his opponent, the current vice president and former California attorney general and senator from the state with the fifth largest economy in the world (see Japan, California, India).  

To the Editor:

Why Vote?

First, before you vote you need to register to vote and if you think you’re already registered to vote, you should confirm this, by rechecking your voter registration status.   

The looming 1980 presidential election was all over the news, the unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter facing the charismatic former actor and California Gov. Ronald Reagan.  A college junior in Boone walked into the Watauga County Board of Elections sometime in September and registered to vote in his first presidential election.

Beginning, Sept. 7, anyone over the age of 21 will be able to purcha se and use marijuana on the Qualla Boundary.  

While the official announcement was made at 10:22 a.m. in the form of a post on the Great Smoky Cannabis Company’s X page, the news actually broke about an hour earlier during an Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council meeting. At the end of that meeting, Council Rep. Richard French, of the Big Cove community made it official. 

To the Editor:

How can you connect at the community, regional, state and national level? At all levels, you can educate yourself on what can be done to improve your county.

Leaders from around the state recently found North Carolina Elections to be fair and secure with opportunities for increased funding, safety measures and improved civic education.