Today, the Rules Committee of the North Carolina Senate is considering a new version of HB 589, an omnibus election administration bill. This version, rewritten by senate leadership, contains changes that would be disastrous for the voting rights of all North Carolinians. Project Vote Executive Director Michael Slater had the following statement in response:
“North Carolina’s senate leadership has taken a bad bill and made it immeasurably worse with new or edited language. HB 589 already included onerous voter ID provisions that could potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of eligible North Carolina voters. Now, the new bill is a wide-ranging package of voter suppression policies that would severely hinder the ability of eligible voters to cast a ballot in the state.
Among the many harmful changes, the bill now includes:
- the elimination of pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds;
- the elimination of same-day voter registration;
- the reduction of early voting by one week;
- the elimination of the mandate for high schools to conduct voter registration drives; and
- increased leniency for voter suppression groups like True the Vote to challenge and intimidate voters at the polls.
In the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina’s senate leadership is making a cynical and potentially disastrous play to enact sweeping voter suppression laws in the state. As Ari Berman of The Nation notes, in 2012, 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early during the 2012 election, and African Americans used early voting at a higher rate than whites. Additionally, over 155,000 voters registered to vote and voted on the same day during the early voting period in 2012.
Project Vote urges the committee to reject these harmful provisions, and help ensure that all eligible North Carolina voters can vote.”