Editorial: Voter photo ID is simple. Twisting it to discriminate is distracting and illegal
Thursday, Sept. 23, 2021 -- Presenting identification to prove that voters are, indeed who they say they are, is appropriate. But legislative leaders want to manipulate a reasonable practice into a way to discriminate and make it harder on some voters who have not, historically, cast ballots along the partisan lines they'd prefer.
Posted — UpdatedNorth Carolina’s legislative leaders have been relentless, spending untold sums of tax dollars, in their efforts to fix something that isn’t broken.
North Carolinians voted to amend the State Constitution to require photo identification to cast a ballot. That vote was NOT a license to discriminate. That is NOT what voters intended.
Presenting identification to prove that voters are, indeed who they say they are, is appropriate and we have long supported it. But the reality is that legislative leaders want to manipulate a reasonable practice into a way to discriminate and make it harder on some voters who have not, historically, cast ballots along the partisan lines they’d prefer. They can, and should, implement the voter photo ID requirement in a in a legal way.
This is not even close to being the biggest issue with voting in North Carolina. The biggest issue is that tens of thousands of people who are eligible to register and vote don’t do it.
In the 2020 election there was the biggest turnout ever. Still, about 1 million North Carolina citizens who were registered and eligible to vote failed to show up at the polls. Then there’s another 1 million citizens on top of that, who don’t even bother to register to vote.
If there’s anything our legislative leaders should be obsessed with, it is how to get EVERY person eligible, to register and make it as easy as possible for them to cast their ballots.
How do we know that people impersonating others to vote is not a problem? Because North Carolina’s 2020 election was the most scrutinized ever. Just ask current state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby and former Chief Justice Cheri Beasley.
Checking to be sure voters are who they say they is fine.
They also were clear in why they found the law unconstitutional as well as providing guidance for legislators to pass a voter ID law that could pass constitutional muster.
“Voter fraud is a vanishingly small phenomenon in North Carolina, with only two documented cases of in-person impersonation fraud out of approximately 4.8 million votes cast in the 2016 general election, for example. A less restrictive law that did not bear as heavily on African American voters, or which included more forms of qualifying ID that African American voters would have been more likely to possess, would have been sufficient to deter the small amount of potential in person voter fraud that may occur. Instead, the General Assembly enacted its preferred and more restrictive version of a voter ID bill during the lame duck session and over the Governor’s veto.”
Rather than insulting the judges, as House Speaker Tim Moore’s lawyer Sam Hayes did in his reaction to the decision and spend more taxpayer dollars fighting it, legislators should take the advice offered by the two judges and craft a law that matches their guidance.
Most significantly, legislators need to direct their energies and resources on ways to get MORE people who are eligible to register to vote and do just as much to make voting as accessible and convenient as possible.
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