With the start of oral arguments in a U.S. District Court challenge to its worst-in-the-nation voter suppression law just three weeks off (plus an accompanying massive protest to be held just outside the courthouse doors in Winston-Salem), last night North Carolina state House and Senate Republicans hurriedly introduced and passed - all within a matter of minutes and without advance notice to house and senate Democrats - a confusing revision to the state's onerous voter ID requirements which are set to take effect in the 2016 election cycle.
North Carolina's comprehensive new voter suppression law features a baker's dozen of odious provisions, from lengthening lines at the polls by cutting early voting days in half and banning same-day voter registration, to putting an end to early voting on the Sunday before election day (thus stymieing 'souls-to-the-polls' GOTV efforts popular among black Christian congregations). But by far its most transparently discriminatory provision is its requirement for would-be voters to show a state-issued photo ID at the polling place beginning in November of 2016...in a state where many poor black voters lack the birth certificates required in order to apply for such IDs, and where many college students in pedestrian-friendly Durham (Duke and NC Central University), Chapel Hill (UNC), and Raleigh (NC State) do not have driver's licenses.
Numerous public signals have suggested to observers that the plaintiffs in the upcoming challenge to this law (NC-NAACP v. McCrory) have hoped to focus their challenge in large measure on the law's voter ID provision, which is perhaps its weakest link. And so, just yesterday, state House and Senate Republicans seemed to agree, as they successfully scrambled to ram a new, unannounced, bill through both chambers to modify the voter ID requirements for 2016, in an apparent effort to provide Governor McCrory's (R) legal team with a new smokescreen to deploy in the oral arguments beginning July 13th.
The bill (House Bill 836) provides a new means for registered voters who are unable to present a photo ID at the polling place to nonetheless cast a ballot - but by means so byzantine that few if any voters are likely to be able to take advantage of the new provision. It provides that a voter without acceptable ID may, no later than the last Saturday before election day, submit in person and only at the county Board of Elections headquarters an application for an absentee ballot, whereupon he or she may receive and cast that ballot.
In short, this latest sleight of hand still bars a voter who lacks ID from voting on election day itself, and requires a voter who by definition lacks a driver's license to somehow find a way to get to the county Board of Elections headquarters (in a state whose poorest and blackest counties are very large and lack adequate public transportation), during office hours, in order to vote.
The ultra-conservative Republican forces who today control North Carolina's government have lately mastered the fine art of fooling credulous progressives (such as, for example, Daily Kos's own Laura Clawson) into believing that their very worst transgressions are actually small victories for progressives, so you should expect to see this new Machiavellian move widely presented as the death of North Carolina's voter ID law. Indeed, Republican supporters are already lining up to provide air cover for this misinterpretation of yesterday's events:
Susan Myrick, elections policy analyst for Civitas Institute, said Thursday that she was caught off guard by the Senate vote.
“To say the least, we were surprised,” Myrick said. The provisional ballot addition, she said, “guts” the ID rule. “It demolishes it,” Myrick said. “There’s no voter ID in North Carolina. It’s over.”
Don't you believe it for a minute.
Believe, instead, the man who has dedicated his life to fighting for Tarheels' civil rights, NC-NAACP's president, Rev. William Barber:
“These legislators try to distract us from the full bill's implications by minimally fixing a leaky faucet but keeping the whole foundations of the bill intact,” Barber said. “The pressure of protest and legal action are exposing their actions and forcing them to adjust. If they were truly interested in change and the tenets of our democracy, they would repeal the entire bill...” [emphasis added]
Now, more than ever, massive turnout by progressives at NAACP's
July 13th protest march in Winston-Salem at the start of oral arguments in NC-NAACP v. McCrory..."Our Selma"...is critically important. Demonstrate to the world that we're not placid fools willing to settle for the scraps falling from the ruined table of democracy:
join us there.
