Voter ID bill raises controversy in North Carolina
(CBS News) RALEIGH, N.C. -- Molly McDonough was among the hundreds of North Carolinians jailed this year for demonstrating inside the statehouse against legislation she fears may prevent her from voting.
"Voting is a right, and these laws are encroaching on that right," said McDonough in an interview on the N.C. State campus where she'll begin her sophomore year this fall.
McDonough, 18, doesn't have a driver's license or a passport, and her college ID won't be accepted under the voting reform bill passed Thursday along party lines by both houses of the Republican-majority state legislature.
McDonough says obtaining documents required to get a state-issued photo ID -- birth certificate, Social Security card, university transcript -- and missing hours at her bookstore job to wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles is unfairly expensive, she figures, about $120 in all.
"That on a minimum wage takes a lot of time to make back up," McDonough says. "I think requiring people to go and spend this much money in order to vote is a poll tax."
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Beginning in 2016, North Carolina polling places will accept only a North Carolina driver's license, a state-issued ID card, a military ID, or a U.S. passport. An out-of-state driver's license will work only if a voter moves into North Carolina within 60 days of an election. An old license possessed by an elderly voter will suffice only if a voter was already 70-years-old when the ID expired.
"It is important for us to listen to what the people want us to do," State Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger told colleagues before the final floor vote. Berger said 70 percent of their constituents support the concept of photo ID.
"Why shouldn't you have to show a photograph to do what is in a democratic election and a democratic process one of the most important things, and that is casting a vote," Berger said in an interview in his office.
He did not dispute State Board of Elections data showing voter fraud to be scarce among the state's 6.4 million registered voters. Only one documented case of voter impersonation fraud was referred to state prosecutors in 2012, and that was eight years after the single previous instance in the past decade.
"The important thing is enhancing confidence in elections," Berger said. "This is something that is about making sure that when people show up to vote, they are who they say they are."
But the North Carolina bill, entitled the Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA), goes much further. It rolls back the increasingly popular early voting period from 17 days to 10 days, even though 61 percent of ballots in 2012 were cast before election day. The bill outlaws early voting on Sunday, which is particularly popular with predominantly black churches bussing "souls to the polls."
In 2012 in North Carolina, Democrats cast 47 percent of the early votes, and Republicans cast 32 percent, according to a CBS News analysis.
The North Carolina bill repeals same-day registration, which allowed 100,000 North Carolinians to register and vote early in one stop in 2008 and again in 2012. In last year's general election, about 1,300 of those same day registrants, or one-and-a-half percent, could not be verified after the votes were counted, according to the State Board of Elections.
The bill also repeals pre-registration for 16 and 17-year-olds who would become eligible to vote at 18. The bill also banned straight ticket voting, whereby a voter chooses a single political party for every office on the ballot.
In North Carolina, about 319,000 voters, or five percent of those registered, do not possess a driver's license or state ID card, and while African-Americans comprise 23 percent of voters, they're 34 percent of those lacking an ID, according to the State Board of Elections.
Seventy-eight-year-old Alberta Currie, a great-granddaughter of slaves, from rural North Carolina, is one of them. Her last driver's license expired when she was 69.
"It make me feel bad, because I want to vote," Currie said. "My grandmother, she insisted, never, never miss a voting day."
Currie has voted in every presidential election since 1956. Born at home to a midwife in the segregated South, her birth was documented only in a family bible. She never had a birth certificate and has been unable to obtain one in recent months.
"I won't have no rights if I can't vote," she said.
Republican Leader Berger rejects the notion that his party is trying to suppress the Democratic-leaning black and youth vote.
"Absolutely not," he said. "I am concerned the people are talking about substantial problem with this that I don't agree exists."
State-issued IDs, which now cost $10, will be free in the future, according to the bill.
State Senator Floyd McKissick, Jr., the Democratic Deputy Minority Leader, tried to stop the reforms he called "draconian."
"We're turning back decades of bills and legislation that have increased voter participation," said McKissick, whose father was a civil rights pioneer -- the first black student who enrolled at University of North Carolina law school; marched with Martin Luther King, and co-founded the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
In an interview, McKissick doubted a Republican formula to maintain the status quo on early voting -- authorizing increased hours and more voting sites in the compressed period.
"There may be more places open, they might have an equivalent number of hours, but if the state local boards don't want to do it, they can appeal to the state and they don't have to do it," McKissick said. "That means the lines are going to be longer on election day, people will end up being turned away, they will be discouraged and less likely to participate in the process."
Berger described the early voting provisions as "leveling the playing field" by requiring county elections boards to open all precincts on the same schedule.
For fives decades, the Justice Department had the power to review state voting laws and block changes it deemed racially discriminatory. In the past two years, it rebuked South Carolina and Texas for imposing photo voter ID laws DOJ deemed discriminatory, respectively, against blacks and Hispanics, because minorities were more likely to lack the required ID or underlying documents.
North Carolina is the thirteenth Republican-dominated state in the past three years to pass a voter ID law and the first state to do so since the Supreme Court struck down federal government review of election laws under sections 4 and 5 the 1964 Voting Rights Act.
Berger said the timing was coincidental. "We've been talking about doing photo ID for years. In fact, we passed photo ID in the last session -- two years before the Supreme Court rendered its decisions," he said.
In 2011, then-North Carolina Gov. Bev Purdue, a Democrat, vetoed the bill in keeping with a partisan pattern. Three other Democratic governors -- in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana -- had their photo voter ID vetoes sustained, but governors in New Hampshire and Arkansas were overridden. When northern states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania moved into Republican control of the legislature and governorship, they moved quickly to pass photo voter ID.
Before the 2011 rush began, seven other states had photo voter ID laws, bringing the total today to 20. Another 14 states require or request voters to present some other form of identification.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said Friday he plans to sign the voting reform bill. When he does, a string of southern states previously covered by the Voting Rights Act -- Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia -- will be photo voter ID states.
"Section 2 is really the meat of the Voting Rights Act, and it remains in effect," North Carolina Senate Leader Berger said. "If folks have a problem with the legislation they're free to file whatever litigation they deem to be appropriate, and the courts will make the decision about this."
