Ballots were not rejected in NC ‘for lack of voter ID’

recent headline in a leading state newspaper surprised this observer: “North Carolina rejected 2,000 ballots for lack of voter ID.”

Why the surprise? North Carolina’s photo identification law allowed any eligible voter to cast a ballot in the recent election, with or without ID.

A further examination provides valuable context missing from the headline.

More than 5.7 million North Carolinians cast ballots during the election. That’s more than 73% of the state’s registered voters.

Of those millions of votes, some 65,000 (1.1%) involved provisional ballots. Those are ballots cast when the prospective voter and a county’s voting records don’t align. Some voters showed up at the wrong precinct. In some cases, elections officials had no record of a prospective voter’s registration. Some voters had been removed from voting rolls. Others never reported a move that changed their voting precinct.

Among the reasons voters cast a provisional ballot, fewer than 6,900 cases (0.1% of the total statewide vote) involved a person with no ID. Yet every one of them cast a ballot. Had they been “rejected,” they wouldn’t be counted among the provisional ballot totals.

Election officials did not count roughly 2,100 of those ballots (0.04% of the total votes cast). But those ballots were not rejected “for lack of voter ID.” Other factors accounted for those ballots’ disqualification.

More than 1,500 of those affected refused to fill out a voter ID exception form. They promised to return to county elections offices at a later date with ID. If they didn’t fulfill that promise, they weren’t rejected. They chose not to follow through on completing the voting process.

Voters who filled out an exception form identified a “reasonable impediment” that prevented them from presenting an ID. More than 4,100 people chose that option, and 3,500 had their ballots counted. Roughly 600 did not.

State elections data do not provide details. It’s likely that the 600 prospective voters never registered or were ineligible for some other reason. County elections boards agreed to count or discard those provisional ballots on a case-by-case basis.

Once again, the ballots were not rejected “for lack of voter ID.” Had that been the case, the 3,500 accepted ballots never would have been included in the final tally.

The distinction is important.

North Carolina has been waiting since May for US District Judge Loretta Biggs to rule in a federal lawsuit challenging the 2018 voter ID law. Biggs signaled as early as 2019 that she’s no fan of voter ID.

Issuing an injunction on New Year’s Eve that year, Biggs lamented North Carolina’s “sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression.” Parts of the law “were impermissibly motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent,” she wrote.

A three-judge 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously overturned Biggs’ injunction nearly a year later. Appellate judges ruled that the trial court had “abused its discretion” when blocking voter ID. Biggs had refused to presume “legislative good faith” in the drafting of the ID law, an error that “fatally infected” her “finding of discriminatory intent.”

Yet Biggs faces another opportunity to derail voter ID. If she thinks 2,000 voters were rejected because they lacked photo identification, she might feel justified in striking down the law for a second time.

Such a decision would be harder to justify if Biggs understands that more than two-thirds of those “rejected” actually chose not to return to local elections boards with an ID after promising to do so. Most of the rest of those “rejected” were ineligible for reasons unrelated to ID.

Biggs might also benefit from a review of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Holmes v. Moore. The case upheld the voter ID law as consistent with the state constitution.

“The people of North Carolina overwhelmingly support voter identification and other efforts to promote greater integrity and confidence in our elections,” Justice Phil Berger Jr. wrote last year. “Subjective tests and judicial sleight of hand have systematically thwarted the will of the people and the intent of the legislature.”

Plaintiffs challenging voter ID in state court “failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that the law “was enacted with discriminatory intent or that the law actually produces a meaningful disparate impact along racial lines.”

North Carolinians support voter ID. Roughly 99.9% of them used a voter ID in the recent election. As we consider the tiny fraction of voters who didn’t present an ID at the polls, we should be clear that none was “rejected” because of the ID requirement.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.