NY Times: “After more than a decade of court battles and legislative jousting over voting rules, North Carolina this month held its first general election under its new voter ID law.
And unlike the pitched battles of the past, it felt like a fight that had largely been fought to a draw, with a more muted ID requirement, and very few ballots that were disqualified.
In 2013, when North Carolina’s Republican-run State Legislature first required voters to pull out a photo ID card before casting a ballot, it stirred a hornet’s nest of protest that the real goal was to keep nonwhite, mostly Democratic, voters from the polls….
This month, voters cast 5.7 million ballots under a new Republican-written voter ID law. How things have changed: Now, North Carolina’s law is being criticized by some on the right as too weak and porous, though the vote went smoothly.
The law — approved in 2018 but stalled by court battles until last year — requires both in-person and mail voters to show proof of identity. That departs from most laws that require an ID only at the polls….
Compared with the earlier voter ID legislation, the current law “is not even night and day, or apples and oranges. It’s cucumbers and baseball bats,” said Christopher Cooper, an expert on state politics and government at Western Carolina University.
With tallies still incomplete, the measure has invalidated the ballots of 2,169 voters who did not produce an ID card, about one in every 2,600 voters and fewer than many expected. But that number is itself a head-scratcher: Virtually all of those rejected voters could have kept their eligibility simply by signing an affidavit explaining why they had no identification.”