CCTA Watchdog Report

North Carolina Legislative Report- May 1, 2013

Dear CCTA Members and Friends,

Last week, I spent a couple of hours reading, and underlining and highlighting House Bill 589 (Edition 4), the photo ID bill which passed the North Carolina house last Wednesday.

To say I found it distressing is to practice British understatement.

First of all, Part II, Section 4 provides for way too many forms of photo ID (I think I counted about 13), and they can be as much as 10 years out of date. It is easy to imagine illegal aliens and out-of-state college students having access to some of them. It's also easy to imagine poll workers having a hard time remembering all the possibilities.

Then, there are exceptions for voters who vote curbside and for "a registered voter who has a sincerely held religious objection to being photographed." (Older parts of the code are quoted for how to handle the exceptions, and quite frankly, I did not look them up.)

I had hoped and expected that we would get something simple and straightforward. We did not.

Then, I got to Part III, Section 22 that provides for effective dates of various parts of the bill, and that was a bummer. The beginning of implementation is July 1, 2013. Great. However, it mainly applies to voter and poll worker education, and not much else.

Part II, the main photo ID part, is effective January 1, 2016. Well, at least people can voluntarily use photo IDs when voting in 2014; however, this doesn't give me much sense of security of voter integrity.

I sent off an email to Senator Norman Sanderson, Representative Michael Speciale, and Representative John Bell objecting to the sorts of things I've just been mentioning. I got a reply from Michael that makes a lot of sense even though I don't like much of it. I gather Michael doesn't really like it either.

I'll paraphrase a little, but here is what Michael told me.

North Carolina, like six other states, is saddled with the requirement to get Justice Department pre-clearance before we can change ANYTHING to do with elections. (Personally, I now think of it as the Department of In-Justice.)

Michael says that things are incorporated into the bill that were in the bills of other states whose voter ID laws have held up to scrutiny by the Justice Department and the Supreme Court.

It appears that a majority of our North Carolina House members believe that if they limit acceptable voter IDs to just U.S. passports, U. S. military IDs, and IDs issued by the state of North Carolina, our new law would not pass muster. (Seems totally unreasonable to me, but a lot that goes on in our country today is totally unreasonable. Michael tried to get an amendment with that kind of limitation passed, and it failed.)

The 2016 effective date for much of the bill is also for the purpose of avoiding having it thrown out.

Michael pointed out that the Supreme Court is considering whether to end Title V (the thing that requires us to get pre-approval from the Justice Department before we can make any changes to NC election law). He expects the Court to announce the decision in June.

Election laws were used for inappropriate discrimination when I was young, but I haven't been young for quite some time, and that sort of inappropriate discrimination is just as far in the past as my youth. If the Supreme Court is about justice, Title V will go.

Michael ended by pointing out that several states have had their voter ID laws thrown out because they were too restrictive, and said we don't want to go there. I agree, but I surely hope we can get a little closer to the edge.

The bill has now gone to the NC Senate. Let's hope some of our truly conservative Senators can put their heads together, have some additional research done, clean the bill up a bit, and still have it pass muster.

Yes, I'm impatient. I'm ready to be not just "a little less bad," I'm ready for us to be "great!"

Sincerely,

Raynor James, Watchdog Sub-Committee Chair for NC Legislature