Lawyers for a group of North Carolina residents who favor nonpartisan municipal elections in their city urged a federal appeals court in Washington today to strike down the federal law the U.S. Justice Department enforced to block a referendum to change the city’s electoral scheme. The city of Kinston, N.C., sought permission from the Justice…
North Carolina currently ranks high in election integrity, but it wasn’t always so. Prior to 2000, we had no uniform standards for voting systems and election administration. Our 100 counties used 18 different types of voting machines, some nearly 40 years old. Four suppliers of the machines were no longer in business, maintenance was limited,…
A Republican-sponsored NC Senate bill, SB 657, has been introduced that, if enacted, would severely cripple the state’s One Stop Early Voting/Same-day Voter Registration law that helped President Barack Obama win North Carolina in 2008. Indeed, the bill would eliminate same-day registration, an important tool of voter empowerment for communities of color, proponents say. The goal,…
Heading into a presidential election in which North Carolina could be pivotal, a new Republican-backed bill would curtail early voting in the state and bar new voters from registering at the polls. The Senate bill introduced last week would shrink the early-voting period by at least a week, end it on Sundays and stop so-called “same-day…
There was a lively discussion on our letters blog today about the proposed Voter ID bill. Supporters of the measure simply can’t understand why anyone would see a problem with requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Joyce McCloy of the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting didn’t weigh in there, but she…
A lot of statistics are being presented and there’s still a lot of confusion about how necessary the voter ID bill is and whether it would make voting difficult for some. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from pushing the bill through. Wednesday afternoon the back and forth between right and left continued in committee.
Republican state lawmakers say they have removed the photo requirement from a bill that would make voters show ID in order to cast a ballot. The latest draft eliminates language that would require a photo ID. Instead, individuals would now be allowed to use a county-issued voter registration card or documents such as a utility bill…
Legislative staff has come up with a non-partisan fiscal note on voter identification. On the high end, it shows the cost to the state could be two-and-a-half million dollars. But critics say that’s way under what other states have reported and isn’t close to what the actual cost may be. The fiscal note offers a…