Voter ID Law Blocked in North Carolina Before March 3rd Primary
No law is really law in the Tarheel State until it’s been ruled on by at least three judges. Or so it seems. This time, it’s the state’s latest version of a voter ID law that has been blocked from implementation.
North Carolina’s Court of Appeals on Tuesday blocked the state’s new voter ID law from taking effect, a move that will likely prevent it from being in place in time for the 2020 elections.
The ruling, coming two weeks before the Tarheel State holds its presidential primaries on March 3, is a victory for civil rights groups and advocates who have argued the law would disenfranchise poor and minority voters. A separate ruling in federal court has already issued a block of the voter ID law through the state’s primaries, and Tuesday’s decision all but ensures a block through the general election in November until another ruling.
In Tuesday’s decision, the court said voter ID provisions “likely will have a negative impact on African Americans because they lack acceptable IDs at a greater rate than white voters.”
The North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley called the voter ID ruling “ridiculous” and said the opinion was “invalidating the votes of more than 2 million North Carolinians who voted for a constitutional amendment in 2018.”
“The opinion, issued by the North Carolina Court of Appeals, ignores the fact that more than 30 other states have enacted similar laws which have been upheld by federal courts,” Whatley said in a statement on Tuesday. “An overwhelming percentage of North Carolinians of every demographic support voter ID and we are very disappointed to see a panel made up of three Democratic judges overturning their votes by judicial fiat.”
given the number of recent losses in state and federal courts regarding both voter ID laws and gerrymandered congressional district maps, I think state Republican party official quoted above is probably just blowing smoke.
I wonder how this plays with the decisions regarding house district boundaries in NC.Report
Can someone remind me how this is different from registering to vote? I can’t keep up with all these laws…Report
this is you have to show ID to vote once registered. Now a lot of people say its no big deal, but they are usually people with either easy access to getting ID (which is getting harder and harder in rural and conservative states), or believe the lie the in-person voter fraud is a thing. Int the 2016 election cycle there were 5 or 6 cases prosecuted nationally of voter fraud where someone attempted to impersonate someone else – and 3 or 4 of those were for mail in ballots. in the whole country. So its not a thing.
I note here for the record that voting as a right guaranteed by the constitution is very heavily regulated . . . and many of those who want it more regulated are the same people who want no regulations on firearms ownership or purchase.Report
When you register to vote, you basically tell the government: “I am this person, who lives here, and I am a US citizen eligible to vote”. The government — usually your State government — then verifies this is true, which is generally pretty simple to check. Sometimes this may require you to submit subsidiary documentation to prove citizenship, but often it’s not needed as your state government can quickly check your information against records that already track whether you’re a citizen.
Once that’s done, you’re registered to vote. You then ask for a ballot, either in person or through the mail.
If it’s in person, that’s where voter ID laws come into play: Voter ID laws stop one thing: In person voter fraud. That is, someone showing up and claiming to be someone else, and then voting under their name. In person. For the record, most states DO require you show your voter card OR a photo ID OR things like two utility bills with your name or address OR a handful of other things that make it clear you are who you say you are. Voter ID laws restrict these down from “a bunch of options that pretty much everyone can satisfy” to “specific types of photo ID”, which are often chosen rather interestingly — for instance Texas tried to insist that a driver’s license or a CC license would count, but not a school ID. Note you don’t have to be a citizen to have a CC license in Texas, so it’s entirely for “face/name” matchup.
It turns out this sort of voting fraud doesn’t happen very often. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that it’s possibly the stupidest and least potentially successful way anyone could go about stealing an election. It’s high risk, no reward, because the sheer number of people needed to actually swing an election this way is staggering.
It’s really easy to tell the law is designed to discourage voting — starting with the utter lack of any actual in-person voting fraud, and then moving onto the general and absolute exclusion of absentee ballots from such voter ID laws, and then of course right into things like — was it NC — that studiously worked out which form of ID’s black voters were least likely to have, and insisted only those types were acceptable.
In effect, voter ID is a solution to a non-existent problem that makes voting more difficult for a very specific set of demographics in a way that highly advantages one party over another.Report
And yet how do all these victims manage to cash checks, buy cigarettes and beer, or drive to work if they don’t have a picture ID? If it disenfranchises poor and minorities, wouldn’t the lack of such ID’s also deny them government benefits, which all require a person to prove who they are?Report
Well, in order:
1. They don’t. They work in cash, or have friends/family cash it after signing it over.
2. Probably fairly easily. I’ve not been carded for beer in like two decades.
3. They don’t drive to work. They don’t own cars and don’t need them.
4. Secondary ID’s exist, and are generally used. SNAP and TANF, for instance, take: Birth certificate, birth records, adoption papers, work ID, student ID, wage or paystub, certificate of US citizenship, immigration documents, collateral statements, etc.
As I noted, Texas oddly decided that CC licenses — which don’t require citizenship — would count for “photo ID” but student IDs, even those issued by public or state schools, would not. Odd choice, don’t you think?
Moving past the ridiculously narrow perspective that everyone MUST drive to exist in America, this could all be solved by simply adopting a national ID system like everyone else. But for some reason, the pro-Voter ID contingent and the pro-National ID contingent form a Venn diagram that does not seem to overlap at all.
How strange.Report