Voting rights groups sue over new NC elections law, seeking to block changes for 2024
Within minutes of passing into law Tuesday, a controversial and wide-ranging change to elections laws led to North Carolina being sued at least twice.
A prominent Democratic attorney sued North Carolina on behalf of multiple voting rights groups Tuesday. So did national Democratic Party, along with its state chapter. Both lawsuits were filed in federal court.
The controversial legislation, Senate Bill 747, became law after Republican lawmakers voted to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of the bill. The override passed with every Republican in favor, and every Democrat opposed.
It contains numerous changes to elections laws, particularly focused on loosening the rules governing partisan poll observers and tightening the rules for mail-in voting. When Cooper vetoed it he said that it "has nothing to do with election security and everything to do with Republicans maintaining and keeping power," noting that it's specifically written to target young voters and non-white voters.
Republicans have defended the law as being needed to improve voters' confidence in elections — and have accused Democrats of exaggerating how many ballots will have to be thrown out in future elections.
"The allegations against the bill are just one more example of why the bill is needed," Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, said Tuesday.
Spokespeople for Republican House Speaker Tim Moore and Republican Senate leader Phil Berger didn't immediately respond to requests for comment about details of the lawsuit. A spokesperson for the state Board of Elections, said they had yet to be served and thus couldn't comment. The lawsuits name as defendants the elections board and its leadership.
WRAL previously reported that many of the specific changes in the new law were pushed, for months, by a group led by Cleta Mitchell, who was former President Donald Trump's attorney during his failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Mitchell personally met with the bill's Republican sponsors in the Senate before they filed it. GOP leaders later said she didn't influence their actions.
The DNC lawsuit
The new law will encourage voter intimidation, the Democratic National Committee said in its lawsuit, due to the newly loosened rules for poll observers.
Democratic state legislators said the same during floor debates Tuesday, urging their GOP colleagues not to override Cooper's veto. They said the law will let poll observers listen in on voters' conversations, take photos of them and get within just a few feet while they're casting their ballots.
"These are the things that are making people scared," Sen. Kandie Smith, D-Pitt, said. "These are the things that make voters feel like their voice isn’t heard, and their vote does not count.”
The lawsuit also challenges numerous other parts of the bill, including a provision to eliminate the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots which the lawsuit says is completely necessary. Republicans have said it's important for voters' trust in the process to have all mail-in ballots counted by election night — a key complaint of Trump's in 2020 — but the lawsuit claims that's disingenuous because at the same time, the law also allows more time for mail-in ballots to be challenged: Drawing out the process, rather than speeding it up.
"The legislature has thus perversely given less time to those who seek to exercise their fundamental right to vote
and more time to those who seek to deny it," the lawsuit says.
Same-day registration lawsuit
The lawsuit by Democratic attorney Marc Elias, on behalf of groups including Voto Latino and Down Home North Carolina, claims the new elections law will unfairly cancel people's ability to vote without them ever being notified or given a chance to defend themselves.
The new law makes several changes to make it easier to challenge the eligibility of people who registered to vote using same-day registration. Until now, the state would send multiple postcards to the address the voter listed, to make sure it didn't get sent back as "undeliverable" — which could indicate the address wasn't actually correct. Because a significant percentage of those "undeliverable" reports are actually due to errors made by postal workers, the state would try twice. Officials also had to let people have the opportunity to tell their side of the story, if that happened.
The new law slashes those protections, the lawsuit says, by requiring only a single attempt to send mail to the voter — and nixing any opportunity for people whose eligibility is challenged to defend themselves, or even be notified of the challenge.
"Instead, they are automatically disenfranchised and not registered to vote—all without being afforded any process to contest the removal of their votes from the count or their exclusion from the voter rolls," the lawsuit states.
Over the years hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians have registered to vote using the same-day registration process: More than 100,000 in each of the 2020 and 2022 elections, the lawsuit claims, anticipating similar numbers in 2024.
The lawsuit also claims that targeting same-day registration is part of a trend for Republican lawmakers, noting that many of the people who could be most affected are Black, Hispanic and/or college students — all groups that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Republicans tried getting rid of same-day registration altogether as part of a wide-ranging 2013 law with numerous election law changes, which was struck down in federal court for intentional racial discrimination.
The same-day registration rules are also being challenged in the broader DNC lawsuit.
