All UNC System schools —and more — now approved for voter ID in 2020
As North Carolina prepares for the introduction of a voter ID requirement next year, a new decision means the entire UNC System will have acceptable photo IDs that students and employees can use in lieu of a driver’s license.
The State Board of Elections has had multiple rounds of applications for entities to get their IDs approved as an alternate form of voter ID. A few UNC System schools were approved earlier this year, and on Tuesday the elections board announced that the rest have all now been accepted.
There are now more than 100 different types of IDs people can show at the polls starting next year to prove their identity. U.S. passports, driver’s licenses, military and veteran IDs, tribal enrollment cards and various state and local government employee IDs will all be acceptable.
For a list of all the different kinds of IDs that can be used, visit www.ncsbe.gov/Voter-ID for a searchable database.
“Now is a great time for registered voters to make sure they have an ID they can use for voting,” North Carolina’s elections director, Karen Brinson Bell, said in a news release Tuesday. “Registered voters may also get a free ID for voting purposes from their county board of elections office.”
While the entire UNC System has been approved, only some of the state’s 57 community colleges will also have IDs that can be used for voting. Additionally, many private colleges and universities also successfully applied to the program — including Duke, Wake Forest, Davidson, Elon, Shaw, St. Augustine’s, Meredith and more.
However, as with the community colleges, there are still some private colleges and universities whose IDs can’t be used — most notably Campbell and High Point.
And while the UNC System schools have all had their IDs approved, UNC Health Care employees will not be able to use their IDs, the N.C. Elections Board said Tuesday.
Recent history of voting laws
The last time the state legislature passed a voter ID law, in 2013, it was struck down as unconstitutional for targeting black voters with “discriminatory intent.” A federal court found that Republican lawmakers had sought out data on what types of voting methods and IDs people of various races tended to favor, and then used that information to craft the law.
The new 2018 voter ID law was written with that previous court ruling in mind. Lawmakers approved more types of acceptable IDs than in the past and also steered clear of controversial voting-rights decisions not related to IDs.
For instance, the new voter ID law doesn’t cut down on early voting, eliminate same-day voter registration or end the practice of letting people who show up to the wrong precinct cast provisional ballots — all things the unconstitutional 2013 law had done.
The new amendment focuses only on ID, and voters approved it in 2018 with more than 55% support.
But while the new constitutional amendment doesn’t address early voting, the legislature has tackled it separately. Lawmakers passed a new law last year that extended the total number hours for early voting, but reduced the number of early voting locations and also eliminated the busiest day of early voting — the Saturday before Election Day.
Months after the Republican-led legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the law, Democrats sued.
One day later, on Oct. 29 of this year, the legislature passed a new law — nearly unanimously — addressing the lawsuit’s concerns by restoring the final Saturday of early voting for 2020 and beyond.
Republican Sen. Ralph Hise, one of the bill’s sponsors, said that new law also contains legal protections “addressing the absentee ballot fraud that took place during the Ninth Congressional District election,” The News & Observer reported at the time.
For more state government news, listen to Domecast, the 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.
