The Mile-Wide Voter ID Loophole
June 27, 2024 — Leaked training documents obtained by Voter Integrity Project reveal the approach NC election officials will take to encourage the use of “Reasonable Exception” form instead of having voters return to the polls with their proper photo ID.
On page 12 of this slide deck, the comments of which were read verbatim by the presenter, reported on a study of last year’s municipal elections comparing the “success rate” for persons voting without a photo ID, under the two provisional voting methods currently allowed by our legislature.
In mainstream voter ID states, anybody attempting to vote without providing proof of photo ID is given a provisional ballot that will not count unless the voter brings a lawful photo ID to election officials before the date provisional ballots are counted. By law, this deadline is one day before the canvass of each election, or nine days after Election Day, but only 18% of the people using this method bothered to return with their ID.
The “Reasonable Exception Affidavit” loophole still involves a provisional ballot and that ballot we thought was guaranteed to be counted unless the voter fills out the form improperly; but a surprisingly high 16% of these were not counted.
Putting the numbers in the SBE’s perspective, 84% of the Exception voters were approved and only 18% of the “bring-later” ones were approved.
North Carolina’s March 2024 elections will go down in history as the event that opened the eyes of millions of voters who discovered, despite a successful constitutional amendment battle and 13 years of legislative performance art on the subject, North Carolina still allows people to vote without photo ID.
We’re told the Legislature dropped a cool $4 million to publicize NC’s recently enacted voter fake ID law by sending one of these postcards to every voter household in the state, prior to the March 2024 primary.
The driving force to this loophole is a portion of the ballot’s language in NC’s 2018 voter ID amendment proposal, which said (in part), “The General Assembly shall enact general laws governing the requirements of such photographic identification, which may include exceptions.” (See Article VI, Sec 2 of NC Constitution.)
For most of the past 13 years, Voter Integrity Project has been at the front of the pitchfork brigade that demanded photo ID and even started getting attacked by squads of RINOs after we exposed how the “Republican” super-majority in the Legislature snuck in the “Reasonable Impediment” provision at the last minute before heading into court.
At the time, House and Senate leadership convinced their party’s prisoners caucus that the change was needed in order to win the lawsuit. Of course, they wound up losing the lawsuit, but the bad provision remained on their list.
Then, in November 2018, a funny thing happened. Berger and Moore lost their super majorities in both chambers, while 53% of the voters approved the voter ID constitutional amendment. Then, while the GOP still held the veto-proof majority, they held a lame-duck session and ran the voter ID bill that became current law.
North Carolina’s current voter ID law is–no kidding–the weakest voter ID law in America because of the affidavit and the only way to get rid of it will be through both legislation and litigation.
But before either of those elements can take place, it will take legislative courage, which the current NC House and Senate leadership is sorely lacking.
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