Statement on the passage of proposed Voter ID amendment

Proposed amendment would ask voters to blindly trust politicians who have already racially gerrymandered a broken legislature

RALEIGH — Progress NC Action released the following statement on Friday regarding the passage of a proposed Voter ID constitutional amendment that is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and will undoubtedly result in even more unconstitutional voter suppression:

“Trusting this legislature to fairly craft details of Voter ID rules after the people have already voted on a constitutional amendment is like trusting the school bully with another kid’s lunch money,” said Gerrick Brenner, executive director of Progress NC Action. “The courts already struck down the NCGOP’s racially-motivated voter suppression law once, and it’s unfortunate that the politicians in Raleigh want to waste time and taxpayer money pushing yet another discriminatory voter ID scheme without giving voters any of the important details.”

[Read: “Why North Carolinians should be wary of the legislature’s vague new voter ID proposal”]

An estimated 218,000 North Carolina voters do not have a current photo ID, a number which disproportionately includes elderly voters, low-income voters, and rural voters who either do not need a current photo ID or are unable to obtain one. In-person voter fraud is practically nonexistent in North Carolina, but voter ID would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.

In fact, North Carolina’s previous voter ID scheme was struck down by federal judges who ruled that lawmakers targeted minority voters “with surgical precision.” Unfortunately, lawmakers have provided absolutely no indication that their new voter ID law won’t contain the exact same discriminatory provisions as the old one.