Old North News

In North Carolina, budget negotiations and the prospect of an almost certain veto by Gov. Roy Cooper have suspended legislative action on three election-reform bills.

Andy Jackson, Director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation, says he expects the House to take up the bills before the end of session – the Senate approved them in June – but that there are obstacles.

“The budget is sucking all the oxygen out of the place right now,” Jackson told Old North News. “The prospect of a veto has taken some of the momentum out of them, too.” 

Andy Jackson | File photo

The part-time legislative session could go well into August, he added.

One bill, S724, would expand absentee voting for the blind, allow online voter registration through the state board of elections and establish an initiative to deliver free voter-ID cards to homes.

Another bill, S326, the Election Day Integrity Act, would make election day the deadline to receive all absentee ballots. The third, S725, would ban local election officials from accepting private money to underwrite the management of elections. 

S725 is a consequence of Facebook donating hundreds of millions of dollars through nonprofit voting-advocacy organizations that set the guidelines for the administration of the 2020 General Elections in counties and cities with heavy Democratic registrations.

Jackson said that there has been a lot of misinformation surrounding the bills. In a June blog posting, he clarified the bills' intents. 

He wrote, for instance, that Section 3 of S326 “promotes transparency by requiring county boards of elections and the SBE (State Board of Elections) to more consistently report on early one-stop and absentee voting. (Inconsistent reporting by the county boards has been the real problem causing missing data.)”

North Carolina has a voter-ID law on the books, which the National Conference of State Legislatures categorizes as “non-strict” ID requirement. But its application has been held up by federal and state court challenges, even though voters approved it via constitutional amendment in 2018. 

A 2013 ID law approved by the legislature was struck down in state court.

The lawsuit over the voter ID law is in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, and it’s being defended by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein. Republican legislative leaders were recently turned away from becoming defendants in the lawsuit brought by the state NAACP and some local chapters – Republicans say they have no faith in Stein, a Democrat, defending the law. 

If the law is upheld, the free voter IDs provided in S724 will be used for ID verification during elections.

An Honest Elections Project study found that 85% of registered voters agreed that it is “common sense” to mandate photo ID.