Amid new GOP-led restrictions, North Carolina students lead a fight to vote during the midterm primary; Democracy Docket, February 18, 2026

Natalie Hausmann, Democracy Docket; Amid new GOP-led restrictions, North Carolina students lead a fight to vote during the midterm primary

"Olu Rouse clearly remembers the first time he voted.

He was a freshman at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), and he meticulously researched candidates before he cast his ballot at his on-campus voting site in the 2024 presidential primary election.

Today, that voting site doesn’t exist. 

Rouse, now a third-year student, is just one of the thousands of students in North Carolina who lack easy access to early voting sites on their college campuses — even as early voting for North Carolina’s primary election is underway.

That’s because the GOP-controlled North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) last month rejected early voting sites at NC A&T, the nation’s largest historically Black college, and three other college campuses across the state: Western Carolina University (WCU), the University of North Carolina-Greensboro (UNC-G) and Elon University.

Student advocates and voting rights experts have warned that the board’s decision represents a major assault on student voting rights in the state. But it has since also catalyzed student advocacy efforts to get out the vote.

Brian Kennedy, a senior policy analyst for the nonpartisan advocacy organization Democracy North Carolina, told Democracy Docket that this newest blow is just one of several efforts to suppress the Black vote across the state and narrow student voting access in general across the country.

“I think we’ve seen the blueprint for what voter suppression across the nation can look like here in North Carolina,” he said.

The legal battle

Rouse was one of dozens of students present at the Jan. 13 NCSBE meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, during which Republican state officials refused early voting sites at the four colleges, which together serve around 47,000 students.

Despite the objections of students who sent a letter to the board and showed up in person to protest the decision, the board denied two new midterm primary sites at UNC-G and NC A&T and rejected two existing sites at Elon University and WCU.  

Several students from NC A&T, WCU and UNC-G, as well as the College Democrats of North Carolina, raised their concerns in a lawsuit* against the board."

MacKenzie Scott Expands Giving Spree to Tribal Colleges; The New York Times, November 20, 2025

 Alan Blinder, The New York Times ; MacKenzie Scott Expands Giving Spree to Tribal Colleges

[Kip Currier: Imagine if more billionaires shared their good fortune with more people in need throughout the U.S. and the world, like MacKenzie Scott is.]

[Excerpt]

"The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is funneling tens of millions of dollars into tribal higher education, months after the Trump administration sought to cut one of the system’s most essential funding sources.

The donations could help shield some tribal schools — which measure their reserve funds and endowments at best in the low millions, not billions — and their students from budget bickering in Washington. Ms. Scott has not made public comments about her recent gifts, but according to the recipients, the funds will support at least one tribal school and a nonprofit group that focuses on scholarships for Native American students.

Little Priest Tribal College, in Winnebago, Neb., announced on Thursday that Ms. Scott had given it $5 million. The school learned of the gift as it was planning a capital campaign that, officials hoped, might raise $10 million over a decade.

“There’s a sense of happiness, a sense of hope,” Manoj Patil, the college’s president, said in an interview. He said of Ms. Scott, “She’s given us hope, hope for success, hope to dream big.”"

8 HBCUs share in $387M donation spree from MacKenzie Scott; Higher Ed Dive, November 5, 2025

Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive; 8 HBCUs share in $387M donation spree from MacKenzie Scott

"In 2019, the same year Scott divorced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, she signed the Giving Pledge, a pact directed at the world’s wealthiest people to donate more than half their wealth.

“I have a disproportionate amount of money to share,” Scott, one of the richest women in the world, wrote in her pledge statement at the time. “And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”

She still has quite a ways to go. As of this week, Bloomberg estimated Scott’s net worth at $42 billion — up from $39.4 billion last November.

Scott is now in the midst of another significant round of donations, and the notably private donor acknowledged the attention it would attract in a rare online statement last month.

“When my next cycle of gifts is posted to my database online, the dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” she said in an Oct. 15 blog post. But she characterized that amount as “a vanishingly tiny fraction” of the hundreds of billions of dollars in annual charitable giving in the U.S. each year “that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news.”

Her most recent spate of HBCU donations include:

• $80 million to Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
• $63 million to Morgan State University, in Maryland.
• $50 million to Virginia State University.
• $42 million to Alcorn State University, in Mississippi.
• $38 million to Spelman College, in Georgia.
• $38 million to Clark Atlanta University, in Georgia.
• $38 million to Alabama State University.
• $38 million to The University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Scott also donated $70 million in September to UNCF, the largest private scholarship provider for minority students in the U.S. The organization, which counts 37 private HBCUs as members, said the money would go to bolstering the long-term financial health of those colleges.

In 2020, Scott donated over $800 million to colleges, focusing much of the funding on HBCUs. In addition to their high-dollar value, her gifts stood out because they were unrestricted, and she did not appear to have a personal relationship with the recipients.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education found that unrestricted contributions to surveyed colleges increased by nearly a third in fiscal 2021 compared to the year before, attributing much of that growth to Scott.

By early 2023, she had donated at least $1.5 billion to roughly six dozen colleges, with an emphasis on minority-serving institutions like HBCUs.

Foundations disproportionately give less to HBCUs compared to similar non-HBCUs, and public HBCUs have historically been underfunded by the government."