Most North Carolinians will never attend a State Board of Elections rulemaking hearing. They will never read 17.0101 or 17.0109. But those obscure rules can decide whether voter ID works as lawmakers wrote it, or as election administrators later quietly rewrite it in practice.
This week, the now-Republican-majority North Carolina State Board of Elections held a hearing, inviting public comment on two measures that would roll back rules put in place by the previous Democratic-majority board. The proposed changes deal partly with deadlines for county boards to decide provisional ballots and absentee ballot cures by the Friday after Election Day, and partly with the county boards’ vote threshold for finding that an ID-exception affidavit is false. Those are technical details, but they affect both ballot counting and public confidence in the voter ID law North Carolinians voted for in 2018.
North Carolina law is written to presume that a ballot is valid unless the county board has reason to believe the affidavit is false. But in 2024, the then-Democratic-led state board added a rule requiring county boards to be unanimous before they could decide an affidavit was false.
Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation was among those who spoke at this week’s hearing. He told the new Republican majority board that he supported changing that requirement to a majority, rather than unanimous, vote. For comparison, he pointed to a different statute where the General Assembly required unanimity, but not in this one. The SBE added a unanimity requirement anyway, giving any single county board of elections member the power to make a disputed ballot valid.
Put simply, administrative agencies should not quietly add requirements the statute does not contain. It undermines the law and voters’ confidence in our democratic process.
For those of us who’ve been around the state legislature since at least 2015 or 2016 — when the fight for voter ID drew protest, hearings, legislative votes, and vehement opposition and vetoes from former governor-turned-US Senate candidate Roy Cooper — we’ve seen it all. Despite increasing clarity that voter ID is preferred by a vast majority of North Carolinians and that the ability to get a valid ID is universal, the debates moved from the legislature to the polling places, to the courts. Now the fight has moved to the rulebook.
The rules governing North Carolina’s voter ID implementation are key to ensuring that voters’ 2018 decision at the ballot box is honored, that election integrity is preserved. Now that those who’ve spent the better part of a decade fighting voter ID in court, their focus has turned to the rulemaking process, where, if voter ID isn’t defeated outright, they work to see how many exceptions, delays, and procedural veto points they can build into the system.
North Carolina’s voter ID law includes accommodations and exceptions for voters who need them: free IDs, provisional ballots, and cure procedures. But an exception system only works if election officials are allowed to say no when an affidavit appears false. Access and enforcement can co-exist, and the State Board of Elections should align its rules with the statute.
