After more than a decade of court battles and legislative jousting over voting rules, North Carolina this month held its first general election under its new voter ID law.
And unlike the pitched battles of the past, it felt like a fight that had largely been fought to a draw, with a more muted ID requirement, and very few ballots that were disqualified.
In 2013, when North Carolina’s Republican-run State Legislature first required voters to pull out a photo ID card before casting a ballot, it stirred a hornet’s nest of protest that the real goal was to keep nonwhite, mostly Democratic, voters from the polls.
Years of litigation followed. When a federal court struck down the law in 2016, the opinion highlighted the ID requirement as one of several provisions that targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”
This month, voters cast 5.7 million ballots under a new Republican-written voter ID law. How things have changed: Now, North Carolina’s law is being criticized by some on the right as too weak and porous, though the vote went smoothly.
Compared with Republicans’ 2013 voter ID legislation, the current law “is not even night and day, or apples and oranges. It’s cucumbers and baseball bats,” said Christopher Cooper, an expert on state politics and government at Western Carolina University.
With tallies still incomplete, the measure has invalidated the ballots of 2,169 voters who did not produce an ID card, about one in every 2,600 voters and fewer than many expected. But that number is itself a head-scratcher: Virtually all of those rejected voters could have kept their eligibility simply by signing an affidavit explaining why they had no identification.
Which raises the question of what the law actually does.
“I don’t know what it accomplishes, other than for some folks who really feel it’s needed, it’s enough,” Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina and a steadfast opponent of voter ID laws, said of the requirement.
A decade ago, voter identification requirements were the spear point of a nascent movement by Republican state legislators to combat what they said were threats of election fraud. But public attention often focused on the laws’ potential to make it harder for some, principally members of minority groups who tended to vote Democratic, to cast ballots. While writing the 2013 elections law, North Carolina Republican legislators consulted a breakdown of citizens who held various ID cards — by race — before deciding which cards would be acceptable for voting purposes.
Today, however, at least 35 states have ID requirements, a prerequisite that has become broadly popular among voters across party lines who see it as a common-sense precaution. Indeed, 55.5 percent of North Carolina voters approved adding a voter ID requirement to the State Constitution in 2018.
“I don’t think anyone ever expected it would make a huge impact, with thousands of votes shifting,” Mitch Kokai, the senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, said of the new law. “It’s mainly giving people more confidence in the election process.”
Studies of the mandates have reached mixed conclusions, but most suggest that if ID requirements reduce voter turnout, the effect is small.
Voting rights advocates continue to argue, and the evidence overwhelmingly shows, that the sort of fraud that most ID laws could prevent — impersonators showing up at polling places — is essentially nonexistent. But the rise of an election denial movement that seeks tougher voting rules has relegated ID laws to the back row of priorities.
In North Carolina, Republicans may have been chastened by the federal court slap-down of their voter ID requirement in 2016. The latest law — approved in 2018 but stalled by court battles until last year — requires both in-person and mail voters to show proof of identity. That departs from most laws that require an ID only at the polls.
But in contrast to the 2013 law, it offers voters an array of acceptable ID cards, from drivers licenses to student IDs to free state ID cards. If voters have no ID — older people who surrendered a driver’s license and mail voters who do not have printers to copy their IDs, among many others — they can ensure their ballots count with the affidavit of explanation, or can show an ID later at a local elections office.
That’s not to say the law has no potential impact.
A preliminary tally this week showed that an incumbent Democratic justice on the State Supreme Court, Allison Riggs, had apparently defeated a Republican challenger for her seat by 625 votes, a little more than a fourth of the ballots invalidated by the new ID law. A 2020 election for the same court was decided by only 401 votes.
Really tight races happen. Whether those 2,169 disqualified votes would have changed the outcome of Ms. Riggs’s race is unknowable.
November’s election offered some evidence that the voter ID law disproportionately hindered Democrats. Of the 2,169 provisional ballots involving ID problems, registered Democrats cast 42 percent, registered unaffiliated voters 30 percent and registered Republicans 26 percent, said Michael Bitzer, an expert on North Carolina politics at Catawba College.
Voting rights advocates say the rules are still onerous and unnecessary. Many people lack the means or time to trek to an elections office to produce an ID. And completing a provisional ballot entails a lengthy interview at a polling place, not an in-and-out stop at a voting machine.
Critics also say the right’s drumbeat about voter fraud laws has made a core civic duty seem too risky for some. “There’s a way in which this becomes a kind of mental barrier” to voting, said Dan T. Carter, a historian of the South and a rural North Carolina resident. “If you’re not really committed, you just don’t bother.”
Although the latest law is far more forgiving than the 2013 version, Professor Cooper said, “Republicans get to accurately claim a win and tell voters they delivered voter ID — which, by the way, the voters of North Carolina voted for.”
Meanwhile, the state’s decadelong struggle over voter ID continues. A challenge to the current ID law awaits a ruling in a federal court. And although Democrats retained the governor’s office in November, the State Legislature stayed safely Republican.
“I’m not convinced this is the final voter ID law we’re going to have,” Professor Cooper said.
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