Republican legislators’ changes to the state’s election law might be all but certain, but Gov. Roy Cooper has made passage a bit harder with his veto of Senate Bill 747 Thursday.
READ MORE: Local election director wary of proposed changes to voting laws
The jam-packed bill restricts same-day registration and absentee voting, and eliminates the three-day “grace period” to accept ballots postmarked on Election Day but delivered after.
If the North Carolina General Assembly’s Republican supermajority overrides Cooper’s veto, the bill would also ban private money from local and state boards use, require more reporting to the state, and mandate purchase of technological certification methods.
Most of the bill’s components would not impact this November’s election, as they go into effect Jan. 1, 2024.
Cooper criticized the legislation in a video statement on Thursday.
“Legislative Republicans are pushing an all-out assault on the right to vote,” Cooper said.
The governor also accused Republican lawmakers of using advice from right-wing election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, an ally of former President Donald Trump in his attempts to subvert the 2020 election. In Cooper’s video, he calls the lawyer an “election denier.”
In April, Mitchell said she was planning to limit voter access and turnout for young voters and students in North Carolina and other states.
“Conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters,” she said. “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.”
In the video statement, Cooper said Republicans don’t want young people, college students living away from home, and Black or brown people to vote because they know those demographics are less likely to vote for them and tend to vote early and by absentee.
North Carolina-specific data, put together by Democracy North Carolina ,shows nearly 4 in 10 voters aged 18-25 cast their ballot by mail in 2020. Two-thirds of North Carolinians chose to cast their ballot during Early Voting, according to the same report.
Pew Research Center data shows 79% of Black people identify as Democrat and 11% are unaffiliated in North Carolina. Only 7% of Generation Z voters are registered with the GOP.
GOP legislators claim the bill increases election security and cuts down on outside influence.
If passed, the law would require mail-in ballots to reach the office by the time polls close on Election Day to be counted. Republicans have cited 29 other states that use the same deadline as justification for the shift.
“Every election has to have a deadline,” Paul Newton, one of the bill’s sponsors, said in the General Assembly in June. “There is no deadline better understood than Election Day.”
The bill also requires county boards of elections to purchase and use “verification software” to check voter’s absentee ballot signatures before accepting them. The bill also requires an unspecified “two-factor authentication” to receive an absentee ballot.
Taking place immediately upon passage is the ban of private money donations. Republicans have been aiming to bar them since 2020. That year the Center for Tech and Civic Like CTCL, funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, distributed $350 million to local election offices. Many states in turn passed laws spurning private money.
New Hanover County used a portion of that money — $59,854 — to pay hazard pay to one-stop officials.
The Brunswick County elections office received $67,000 of those funds, and it is also a member of the CTCL’s offshoot — not funded by Zuckerberg — the Alliance for Election Excellence. The county commissioners have already tried to influence the board to terminate the agreement — of which has only yielded $2,000 reimbursed travel expenses and networking opportunities. But Brunswick Board of Elections voted 3-2 to reject the request.
The General Assembly could call a vote on a veto override to Senate Bill 747 as early as next week.
Cooper announced he also plans to veto Senate Bill 749. It proposes reforming the structure of the state and county boards of elections. The bill would take the power away from the governor to appoint the boards and give it to lawmakers instead.
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