Voting rights groups find new photo ID law caused trouble for voters and county officials
Voters who show up to the polls without an acceptable ID are supposed to have two choices.
Editor’s note: Rutherford County and several NC counties skipped the 2023 election, as I previously reported. Listen to what Rep. Jake Johnson recently said here.
Judith Nash’s shaky handwriting on a voter ID exception form she filled out in Guilford County on Election Day is a sign of lost muscle control that comes with Huntington’s disease.
A few days after she and her husband voted, Nash received an email from the Guilford elections office saying, essentially, they thought she was lying on the form, and questioning why she was well enough to vote but not able to get an ID.
“You are hereby given notice of grounds for falsity of the affidavit, including but not limited to, you were able to obtain transportation and were well enough to vote, but did not utilize the same resources to obtain and present a Photo ID,” said the letter from Guilford Elections Director Charlie Collicutt. The Guilford Board of Elections had voted 3-2 to send letters to a handful of voters and hold a hearing about the information on their ID exception forms.
Lewis Nash, Judith’s husband, said in a telephone interview that his wife was diagnosed with the hereditary degenerative disease a little more than two years ago and uses a wheelchair. She has a driver’s license, he said, but they did not have it when they went to the polls.
“Election officials concluded she did not have any kind of ID,” he said. “She filled out a provisional ballot and she voted.”
State records show that she has voted regularly in North Carolina for at least 23 years.
Nash said he was surprised to receive such a letter.
“I thought well, what are you going to do? Fine her $100 and 30 days? I never received anything like that,” he said.
The test run
North Carolina voters were asked to show an acceptable form of photo identification this year during municipal elections. This was the first year photo ID has been required since a similar law was temporarily in effect for the 2016 primaries.
Voters who show up to the polls without an acceptable ID are supposed to have two choices. They can cast provisional ballots and fill out exemption forms saying why they do not have an ID. Or, they can cast provisional ballots with the understanding that they need go to their local board of elections with an ID before the vote count is certified in order for their ballots to be accepted.
Bob Hall, a voter advocate and former executive director of Democracy NC, obtained four letters Collicutt sent to voters this November that claimed a belief that they had lied on their forms and informing them they could talk to the board about it at a hearing. None of the voters showed up for the hearing and the board ended up counting all their ballots.
During the Guilford board’s meeting, Hall used the Zoom “chatbox” to criticize the board’s actions as having a chilling effect on voters.
Collicutt said in a brief telephone interview that a board member dictated the contents of the letters. He directed all other questions to the Guilford Board of Elections chairman.
Chairman Richard Forrester said in a telephone interview this week that he thought it was “worthwhile looking at their statements rather closely” because voter ID is new.
Voter advocacy groups fanned out across the state to watch and record how local boards of election in 35 counties were implementing the new photo ID law. Democracy NC, Common Cause NC, and the League of Women Voters, with support from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Disability Rights NC, and You Can Vote monitored the county vote counts, according to Democracy NC.
These groups’ observations are the most comprehensive reports so far on implementation of the law as the state prepares for the 2024 elections and the increased voter turnout that comes in presidential election years.
“This is a tiny election because turnout and participation is abysmally minuscule,” said Marian Lewin, vice president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina. “This is our one and only before the big one comes.”
The municipal elections were also a lesson in the importance of every vote. More than six municipal elections ended in tie votes, State Board of Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell told members last week.
Confusion and misapplication of the law
Most voters handled the new law with no problems. But the advocacy groups found local elections board members who were confused about the requirements or didn’t want to follow state board instructions, as well as voters who were given inaccurate information.
One county board had a lengthy discussion over whether they should accept the ID exception form filled out by an older voter with an out-of-state license who doesn’t drive anymore, Lewin said.
In a coastal county, the board discussed whether they should accept the form of an Uber driver who said he needed a Virginia license for his job, Lewin said.
In some counties, voters were turned away if the address on their ID and their voter registration home address didn’t match, she said. The IDs are not supposed to be used to match addresses.
“There’s a fair amount of variation,” Lewin said. “That’s not ideal in a statewide election where you’d like every voter to be treated the same way regardless of where they live.”
Carol Moreno Cifuentes, policy and programs manager at Democracy NC, said some voters who should have been offered the chance to fill out ID exception forms were turned away.
“We’ve seen a lot of inconsistency with training,” she said. “Some boards are being more critical and skeptical about voters’ intentions.”
For example, Union County board member Sanford Steelman looked at dates when absentee ballots were mailed and when they were returned to the county elections office with forms saying voters did not have a copy of an ID to send.
“I just find it to be totally disingenuous,” Steelman said at the Nov. 16 meeting considering provisional and absentee ballots. “If they’ve had the ballot for two weeks, that defies common sense.”
Under the law, county boards of election should find provisional ballots are valid unless the board “has grounds to believe the affidavit is false.”
A unanimous vote of county boards is required to throw out a ballot based on a false affidavit, and the board has to record the grounds for rejecting it.
The local boards are not supposed to second-guess why voters don’t have photo IDs, Brinson Bell told county boards in a September memo.
“A decision that the Form is false must be based on facts, not speculation, and may not be based on personal opinion as to whether the voter’s asserted reason is a good enough reason for being excepted from the photo ID requirements,” the memo says. “Importantly, it is not the county board’s role to second-guess the reasonableness of a voter’s asserted impediment to showing photo ID. Instead, the board is only concerned with the truth or falsity of the statements made on the Form.”
Statewide, 44 ID exception forms were rejected. Thirty of those rejections were in Mecklenburg County.
Mecklenburg Board of Elections Director Michael Dickerson pointed out that Mecklenburg, which has the second-highest number of registered voters, had countywide elections. Wake County has more voters, but Raleigh City Council elections aren’t until next year.
Mecklenburg had 120,662 people vote in November. Across 86 counties, 515,060 people voted in last month’s municipal elections. So, Mecklenburg accounted for about 23% of the statewide vote and 68% of the voters who had their ballots tossed because their ID exception forms were rejected.
A few Mecklenburg voters whose exception forms were rejected said they had ID, but refused to show it. About a dozen people whose forms were rejected said they had IDs, but forgot to bring them to vote. One person said she was waiting for a DMV appointment.
Voters who had ID but forgot to bring it to the polls could have cast provisional ballots without exception forms and traveled later to the board of elections to show it.
According to the State Board of Elections, 2,031 of the 3,744 provisional ballots cast in the municipal elections were approved, 1,621 were not counted, and 92 were partially counted.
A need for more training
Forgetting or not having an ID aren’t the only reasons a voter would cast a provisional ballot. Other reasons include failure to register a change in residence or voting in the wrong precinct.
According to state elections data, 220 voters who did not fill out exception forms and did not have ID with them cast provisional ballots. These are voters who would have had to return to the elections board with IDs in order to have their votes count. It turns out most of them didn’t. About 175 of those ballots were not counted because there was “no ID provided.”
Keith Chappelle, a policy program associate at Democracy NC, said it’s clear more training is needed.
“I think there needs to be more education on the county board level and with the poll workers,” he said.
State Board of Elections spokesman Pat Gannon agreed.
“This is a new thing not only for the poll workers, but also for the county boards of elections,” he said. “The municipal elections were the first elections where the new photo ID requirement was in effect, and the law and the exceptions to some degree are new as well.”
Lewis Nash, the Guilford County voter, said the board calling for his wife to account for her lack of ID won’t keep them from voting. They’ll just bring the ID next time. Still, “sounds to me that something is going on with the elections people,” he added.
This article first appeared on NC Newsline by Lynn Bonner and is reprinted under a Creative Commons license.
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