NC Republicans sue elections officials for allowing UNC’s digital ID in voting

The lawsuit is the fourth Republicans have filed in recent weeks that would make it harder to vote in a state that could decide the presidential election in November

North Carolina Republicans have again sued the state board of elections for trying to make it easier to vote.

This lawsuit, one of at least four that state and National Republicans have filed in recent weeks, seeks to block the board’s decision to allow students and employees from the University of North Carolina to use digital versions of their UNC IDs as a voter ID.

The physical UNC ID cards were approved as voter IDs last year, but the board voted 3-2 in August to approve the digital versions, available only on iPhones, after confirming that they include a photo and expiration date as required by law.

The lawsuit, however, claims that state law says only physical IDs can count as voter IDs.

“The law does not allow the NCSBE to expand the circumstances of what is an acceptable student identification card, beyond a tangible, physical item, to something only found on a computer system,” the lawsuit says. 

The suit hinges on competing readings of what a “card” means. 

“A voter photo identification card,” the suit says, “is a physical object as described by law.” But the law never explicitly describes it that way.

Lawyers for the board told members at the Aug. 20 vote that their reading was that the law does not limit official cards to their physical form.

Besides, board member Alan Hirsch, a Democrat, said at the meeting: If airlines accept verified, legal, bonafide digital tickets then the election board should do the same for voting.

“There’s certainly enough flexibility within the statute for us to approve a digital card as a card. I think that’s the way of the world,” Hirsch said. “I think everyone of a certain younger generation than we are lives by that.”

When asked for comment, Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the NCBOE, referred Cardinal & Pine to the discussion at the board meeting.

Extra burdens

Voters now have to show a photo ID at polling sites, and though most voters will use their driver’s license or passport, the NCBOE last year asked state colleges, universities, local governments, and other education institutions to apply to have their IDs approved as well. 

The board has approved more than 130 of these IDs based on several requirements, including that the ID show a photo and an expiration date. 

UNC’s digital IDs show both.

But Republicans claim in the lawsuit that allowing digital IDs opens the door to widespread fraud, a claim they’ve made, without evidence, in several unrelated lawsuits.

Blocking the digital IDs, however, would make it harder for legally registered voters to vote. 

State law says that college students can register to vote in the communities where they go to school, but most out-of-state students would not have in-state driver’s licenses, a big reason why voter ID laws overall create extra burdens for college voters.

The UNC system caps out-of-state admissions at between 18-35%, depending on the university, but that is still a lot of students. 

UNC students use their ID cards to access buildings and make payments on campus, but if a UNC student opts for the digital version of the ID, their physical ID no longer works. While that would not affect the physical ID’s use as a voter ID, most students would be unlikely to carry both with them at all times, creating an extra hoop to jump through for a large number of prospective voters.

Flurry of lawsuits

The state and national Republicans also sued the NCBOE twice last month after it refused their demands to disenfranchise more than 200,000 voters in violation of federal law. 

Under federal statutes, states are barred from removing voters from the registered voting rolls en masse within 90 days of an election. But the lawsuits, filed by Republicans well after that deadline passed on Aug. 7, ask the state to cancel the registration of some 225,000 voters based on false assertions of voter fraud and what elections officials call a misunderstanding of state law and the misrepresentation of state voting data.

In one lawsuit, Republicans, with zero evidence, accused the (NCBOE) of allowing hundreds of thousands of nonresidents to hide on the state’s voter rolls, even though a state database does not include their driver’s license or social security numbers as required. In the other suit, state and national Republicans said the board had “deliberately declined” to enforce a recent state law that requires officials to purge voter lists of anyone who got out of jury duty by claiming not to be a United States citizen. 

Gannon said in a statement last week that the lawsuits, filed days apart, are “categorically false” and seek “an impossible solution.”

State and federal law already bar noncitizens from voting, and multiple studies over the years have shown that it is exceedingly rare that noncitizens successfully register to vote, much less actually cast a vote. 

The suggestion that state officials were turning a blind eye to mass voter fraud is “an entirely false premise,” Gannon said.