NC makes common-sense reforms

By Robert Danos, Hendersonville Times-News, August 25, 2013.

The new voter ID law is being used to paint the new GOP legislature and governor in the nastiest terms possible, even though the charges do not hold up under scrutiny. Protesters who suggest this law is "embarrassing our state" are only showing that they have never actually looked at the voter laws of the majority of other states.

Both Sen. Tom Apodaca and Rep. Chuck McGrady knew that by seeing this bill to fruition they would be called vote suppressors and modern-day Jim Crow fans by special-interest groups on the left. They are to be commended for not letting that deter them as these common-sense reforms now put us line with the best practices of the majority of states that already had most of these (if not stricter) provisions in place.

Using simple facts and statistics, I will break down the most common threads of misinformation that have been seen in these pages' letters and columns the past few weeks, including those being pushed by Hendersonville's own "Moral Monday" protesters.

"Voter ID is about minority voter suppression." I start with the nastiest allegation because it is the easiest to disprove. If a law that requires voters to present a photo ID (free at any DMV to those who do not have one) suppresses the minority vote, then we should be able to look at the states that recently passed photo ID laws and see a lower turnout of minorities. However, in each of the states that have instituted photo ID in the past 10 years (Georgia, Indiana and Texas), minority voter turnout has increased, and not only in the two cycles with Barack Obama at the top of the ballot.

A headline from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Sept. 3, 2012) says it all: "Despite voter ID law, minority turnout up in Georgia." It goes on to say that "turnout among black and Hispanic voters increased from 2006 to 2010, dramatically outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period."

"They cut early voting in half." I have seen this statement on these pages several times, and it is one that is only vaguely "true" if you leave out some huge facts. Yes, the number of early voting days dropped from 17 to 10. However, the hours that early voting sites must remain open increases both before and after normal office hours, equal to the number of hours from the seven days that were cut. As a result, voters who never voted early because they could not vote between 8:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. won't have to skip early voting anymore. The total hours of early voting is the same, Board of Elections operations are made more efficient, and the system is now more convenient to those who work 9-to-5 jobs.

This supposed "cut" in early voting is also pointed to by some of the protesters as something that North Carolina should be ashamed of. I wonder if they know that 16 states have no early voting at all, including some of the states that we're told by the far left we should aspire to be more like, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.

"Ending same-day voter registration is going backward for no reason." Same-day voter registration was put in place just in 2007, and security experts saw the major flaw from the beginning. For the Board of Elections to verify that a new voter is legitimate, it must try (twice) to deliver a voter card to that voter's mailing address. Having a voter register during the last week of early voting made it impossible to achieve that step, but the vote had to be counted, anyway.

Have any of the writers calling this step a "repressive" change told you how many other states allow same-day voter registration during early voting? The answer is one.

"Ending straight-ticket voting is voter suppression." I left this one for last because it hardest to believe that people of good faith can argue it has something to do with "voter suppression." Yet, we have read columns and letters on this page that have included the end of straight-ticket voting on the list of things the GOP has done to "suppress the vote."

I am sorry to people on both sides of the aisle who liked straight-ticket voting, but North Carolina was one of only 14 states with this out-of-date option left, and we were the only state that had the arcane system of having to vote for president first before you decided if you wanted to vote straight ticket.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave politics one of its most enduring and valuable quotes: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

That statement is most needed when emotional arguments over a topic are repeated so often that some people accept them as true without going further than the "news opinion" source of their liking (a disease found in all parts of the political spectrum) to reinforce what they already have heard.