For more than a decade, North Carolina has seen a back-and-forth over voter identification rules. The requirement finally got its first major test in last month’s presidential election.
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For more than a decade, North Carolina has seen a partisan back-and-forth over voter ID rules. The requirement finally got its first major test in the presidential election. A tiny fraction of people had their ballots rejected, though critics note that Black voters were more likely to have their ballots not counted. Steve Harrison from member station WFAE in Charlotte has this report.
STEVE HARRISON, BYLINE: Counting primaries and local elections, Kelle Pressley of Charlotte has voted 29 times since 2008. But when she came to vote on last month’s election day, she didn’t have her ID.
KELLE PRESSLEY: I change bags often, and I was thinking I had it on me, and I didn’t. I still haven’t found it.
HARRISON: Pressley says there was confusion at her precinct about her options. After calling a voter protection hotline, she ended up filling out a photo ID exception form, where she checked a box that said she had lost her license. Her ballot ultimately counted.
PRESSLEY: Someone else would have taken the road less traveled and – most traveled and been like, forget about it. I’m not voting. You know, que sera sera. Whatever will be will be. I’ll leave it in fate.
HARRISON: Pressley was one of nearly 6,900 North Carolinians who came to vote without photo ID. Most of those people were able to cast a provisional ballot, and in the end, just 1,670 people had their ballots rejected out of more than 5.7 million voters. But attorney Kathleen Roblez with the group Forward Justice, which has a pending lawsuit over voter ID, says that’s still too many people, considering in-person voter fraud has been found to be almost nonexistent. And she says more people were probably impacted this year.
KATHLEEN ROBLEZ: So you really have no idea how many people saw all of the information about ID and said, you know, I can’t vote.
HARRISON: The bitter fight over voter ID in North Carolina goes back a decade. After North Carolina Republicans first enacted photo ID in 2013, an appeals court in 2016 ruled that GOP lawmakers targeted Black voters with almost surgical precision. The current law is more lenient in that it allows multiple IDs and it lets people cast provisional ballots so long as they list a reason for not having identification. But in this year’s election, Black voters made up 30% of the rejected ballots despite being about 20% of the electorate. Here’s Roblez again.
ROBLEZ: Black North Carolinians statistically lack the kind of IDs that would be approved, and they are also statistically more likely to have a hard time getting the other ID.
HARRISON: But while there was a disparity, the actual number of Black voters whose ballots didn’t count was arguably small at 502 rejected ballots. Andy Jackson with the conservative John Locke Foundation says there will always be differences among racial groups and political parties in any requirement.
ANDY JACKSON: And I don’t know if anybody ever expects any statistic to be exactly the same.
HARRISON: Some GOP lawmakers have said the use of the photo ID exception form makes the law toothless, and some Republicans have floated the idea of closing that loophole. But Jackson says most Republicans want to move on after 10 years of fighting.
JACKSON: I don’t know how strict they want to go just because I’m not sure what appetite they have for, you know, another lawsuit.
HARRISON: Photo ID didn’t impact this year’s presidential race, which Donald Trump won by 183,000 votes. But some races are much closer, like a state Supreme Court race where a Democrat went into a recount up by 722 votes. For NPR News, I’m Steve Harrison in Charlotte.
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