Cooper signs bills on hog farms, vote-by-mail expansion and juvenile justice reform into law
It will be easier for North Carolinians to vote by mail in this November’s elections, and the state will have millions more dollars to address coronavirus health concerns at in-person polling places.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper signed a wide-ranging elections bill into law Friday, HB 1169. It passed the N.C. General Assembly with the support of every Republican and most Democrats. In addition to its other changes listed above, the bill also includes extra money for increased cybersecurity, among other things.
“Making sure elections are safe and secure is more important than ever during this pandemic, and this funding is crucial to that effort,” Cooper said. “This legislation makes some other positive changes, but much more work is needed to ensure everyone’s right to vote is protected.”
Supporters of the bill had cited the long lines to vote recently in Georgia and Wisconsin that have made national news, causing hours-long waits for people trying to vote in person, as one reason to increase election spending here — in addition to making it easier to request, use and track absentee mail-in ballots.
The changes, however, will only apply to the 2020 elections . Officials believe that this year the state could see nearly half its votes cast by mail.
“As we’ve seen recently in states such as Georgia and Wisconsin, we face unprecedented challenges in holding elections amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of the government watchdog group Common Cause North Carolina, after Cooper signed the bill into law. “The clock is ticking with less than five months before Election Day and it is crucial that North Carolina prepares now to meet those challenges.”
Expanded mail-in voting is often supported by Democrats but sometimes opposed by Republicans — President Donald Trump has recently repeated numerous false claims and conspiracy theories about fraud, for instance — which makes the Democratic votes against this bill appear odd at first glance.
The Democrats who did oppose the bill said they didn’t like an unrelated section, tweaking the state’s controversial voter ID law. That law has been temporarily blocked from going into place, after two different courts ruled that it appears the legislature passed it in 2018 with racist motivations to target Black voters.
But the court cases aren’t over yet, and if voter ID’s Republican supporters win in court in the next few months, it’s possible that voters could be required to show ID at the polls.
Other bills becoming law
Cooper signed five bills into law Friday, including the elections bill.
Two of them, SB 390 and HB 1063, were relatively minor. But the two others will affect many areas of the state.
The Farm Act of 2019-20, SB 315, had some provisions opposed by environmental groups but was overall backed by farmers.
In an opinion article for WRAL, Duke University’s co-director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, Ryke Longest, wrote that the farm act contains a loophole for hog farms to get around pollution rules that were put in place in the 1990s, while also shielding their records from the public.
“It’s a one-two punch that would shroud polluting farms in secrecy while allowing them to expand for the first time since 1997,” Longest wrote.
However, the Farm Act also contains many other less controversial changes, like added protections for farmers driving tractors on roads and the creation of a group called the “North Carolina Sweetpotato Advisory Council.”
Cooper did not comment on that bill when he signed it.
Finally, Cooper also signed into law HB 1187, with new funding for the “Raise The Age” criminal justice reforms. passed in 2017. Before those reforms went into place last year, North Carolina was the only state in the country that was still charging all 16-year-olds as adults no matter the criminal charge.
Now, 16- and 17-year-olds will be charged as juveniles by default — although prosecutors still have the option to charge them as adults in serious cases.
It’s well-established that juvenile justice reforms like this actually save money in the long run, since teens who are sent into the juvenile system for legal troubles instead of to adult prisons are less likely to become repeat criminals. But in the short term the state needed extra funding to implement the changes, including building or renovating more juvenile facilities.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published June 12, 2020 at 4:20 PM.
