Most North Carolinians dread a trip to the DMV. But if President Trump and Republicans in Congress have their way, that same bureaucratic headache — with its red tape and inflexible “produce-your-papers” requirements — is exactly what you can expect when you register and vote in the future. And unlike with the DMV, you won’t just be inconvenienced by not getting the right paperwork to update your drivers license; with elections, your fundamental right to vote under the Constitution may be taken away.
The U.S. House recently passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, and it is pending in the Senate. While its title sounds harmless, the reality is a direct assault on your constitutional right to vote. Under this bill, the simple act of registering to vote would become a bureaucratic nightmare that could disenfranchise many eligible citizens.
The SAVE Act mandates that every person registering to vote must provide specific, narrow proof of U.S. citizenship. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience; for many North Carolinians, it is a wall.
You might think you can use your real ID that you put so much work into getting, but it won’t work. Our state’s licenses don’t indicate citizenship, which is a requirement under the SAVE Act — making them useless under this law.
You can use your passport, but most of North Carolina’s citizens — around 56% — don’t have a passport. And it’s unclear if you can even use one if it’s expired.
All this means that a photo ID with a birth certificate is probably the way most voters would prove their citizenship under the SAVE Act. Finding a birth certificate can be difficult for many people, especially older folks who grew up in rural areas, of which our state has many. But even if you locate such a record without much fuss and expense, women who changed their name since birth will have the extra requirement of proving their identity and name change.
While the vast majority of North Carolinians have valid, government-issued photo IDs, a sizable number don’t — estimated in the hundreds of thousands. These citizens would be unable to vote altogether. To put that into perspective, when our legislature enacted our voter ID law, it created exceptions for people living on the margins of society who cannot produce such IDs. Because, of course, no citizen should be denied their right to vote due to a lack of resources. The SAVE Act offers no such mercy.
For those who have documents, they will have to go in person to present these documents to county election officials, or they will not be registered. This will end online voter registration through the DMV, which millions of North Carolinians have come to rely on as the most popular method of registering. Voter registration drives will effectively end too. What’s the point of asking people to register in a shopping center parking lot if they’ll have to make a separate trip to the county office?
The bill even threatens election officials with criminal penalties for paperwork errors. This will create a system where election officials will have every incentive to find your documents are insufficient for any minor problem. At a time when we need dedicated poll workers, we shouldn’t be threatening them with jail time for minor administrative mistakes.
It doesn’t end there. Even if you can get registered, voting itself would be a lot harder. If you happen to forget your photo ID on election day, there are almost no exceptions, and the list of acceptable IDs would be much more restrictive than the photo ID law that is currently in effect.
Our state has already spent millions educating voters on our current photo ID law. The SAVE Act would throw that progress away, eliminating common-sense exceptions for student and veteran IDs and giving voters only three days to “fix” any paperwork issues before their ballot is trashed.
Alarmingly, the law provides no transition period for these drastic changes. Typically, when the government makes substantial changes to voting laws, a period of years is provided to allow citizens and election workers to prepare. The SAVE Act, however, would go into effect as soon as it passes, virtually ensuring chaos at the polls and voter disenfranchisement.
The SAVE Act is a solution in search of a problem. Proponents claim they want to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat,” but evidence of noncitizen voting is vanishingly small. And the cost of “securing” the system this way is the disenfranchisement of regular citizens — with a particularly heavy burden on women, the elderly, the impoverished, and rural voters.
We cannot allow our elections to be turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. Senators Tillis and Budd must stand up for North Carolina voters and oppose the SAVE Act. Our democracy depends on making it easier for citizens to participate, not harder.
Paul Cox and Katelyn Love are former general counsels for the North Carolina Board of Elections who served under Democratic and Republican administrations.
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