Noah Jabusch
Over spring break, while many students across the state were enjoying a break from classes and relieving built-up stress, the State Board of Elections (BOE) was making it harder for many of them to vote in upcoming elections.
Last week, all the universities in the UNC System applied to the Board to have their student IDs count for voting under the new state voter ID law. However, the BOE voted to reject the applications of most UNC System schools, including UNC-Chapel Hill. While NC State’s IDs were accepted, this ruling will negatively impact thousands of college students throughout the state.
College students are a notoriously difficult group to mobilize for elections. Turnout for young people in the 2018 elections, although higher than past midterms, still lagged significantly behind the national average. While some of this can be chalked up to apathy, making the process more difficult will surely disincentivize those who are already on the fence about voting.
The General Assembly (GA) and affected universities need to work out how to resolve this gap in the law. The rejected schools failed to meet some of the standards the GA set for student IDs in order to count, such as having a school-taken photo, having an expiration date and confirming social security numbers and other personal information before the card is issued.
However, blame does not rest solely on the universities for failing to meet these standards. For one, the standards were only established in December of last year, giving schools relatively little time to address any areas where they fell short. For another, the legislation implementing the requirement was passed during a lame-duck session of the GA, before Republicans lost their supermajority control in both chambers.
When the legislation was being considered, its authors insisted that it would make obtaining IDs easy. Part of this was the law’s allowance for college student IDs to count for voting, but as evidenced by the recent BOE decision, the law’s standards for student IDs preclude thousands of IDs from qualifying.
It should be noted that the law in question is the subject of multiple lawsuits, and a judge recently overturned the constitutional amendment requiring it to be written. However, with important elections coming up in 2019, including a hotly contested race in the state’s 9th U.S. House district, college students need clarity on this matter.
One option could be to grandfather in existing IDs while working with universities to rework their ID systems to conform to the law’s standards. Another possibility would be to issue government-sanctioned IDs through university channels, to ensure any eligible student voters received them in time to vote.
Fortunately for NC State students, we can rest a bit easier knowing our student IDs will allow us to vote, regardless of how lawsuits and other matters affect the law. But for many other students all around the state, voting in the next elections just got more difficult, as they will have to individually acquire an ID from a state-approved source ahead of this year’s elections.