Brennan Center

by Jeremy Leaming

North Carolina, which last year voted to amend its constitution to ban same-sex marriages even though it already had a law doing that, is now on the verge on enacting one of the nation’s more onerous voter ID laws. 

Late last week the N.C. House easily approved the so-called Voter Information Verification Act that would require people to present government-issued voter photo IDs before casting ballots. It is expected to pass the Senate and the State’s Republican Governor Pat McCrory has signaled he’ll sign it into law. Brentin Mock reporting for ColorLines noted that last week’s vote in the lower chamber drew throngs of N.C. university students to protest the new law.  The measure would make it arduous for the state’s colleges and university students to engage in democracy. And other measures being considered, as Mock reports, are also aimed at making voting burdensome, such as limiting early voting and prohibiting all early voting on Sundays.

The Brennan Center’s Lucy Zhou in an April 25 post about the ongoing state efforts to place more burdens on voting described N.C. as a “hotbed of restrictive voting bills” and listed the array of measures the state is moving to implement. Zhou notes that North Carolina lawmakers are striving to undercut the state constitutional rights of students to vote at their college addresses, by penalizing parents. If students register to vote under a different address, like their university address, parents will be barred from “listing their children as dependents on state tax forms ….”

State Rep. Thom Tillis (R-Mecklenburg) in a column for The Charlotte Observer called the photo ID bill “common-sense” and likened it to showing a photo ID to board an airplane. The problem with this type of argument is that it misses a fairly significant point. Voting is integral to democracy and indeed is protected in numerous places in the U.S. Constitution. But what about air travel and purchasing cocktails or even certain kinds of decongestants, which also require identification. Those actions may be vital to the pursuit of happiness, but not all are constitutionally protected rights, and certainly not as integral to democracy as voting.

Tillis claims “fringe elements have relied on heated rhetoric to frame this issue ….”

There is, however, nothing radical, over-the-top, or wild-eyed about noting the fact that North Carolina lawmakers are not able to point to any in-person voter fraud that has occurred in their state. Instead it is Tillis and his cohorts who are misinforming the public by claiming the integrity of the vote needs to be protected, while offering not a shred of evidence as to when that integrity was compromised.

by Gabriel J. Chin, Professor of Law, University of California Davis School of Law

This week, the Supreme Court heard argument in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, a case at the intersection of two lines of cases which have been prominent on the Court’s docket in recent years. The case is an example of a challenge to Arizona’s apparently endless cornucopia of anti-immigrant legislation. It also tests measures which, according to some conservatives, are designed to preserve the integrity of the ballot box, but according to others are calculated to suppress the minority vote.

The case involves Arizona’s Proposition 200, passed in 2004, which requires prospective Arizona voters to provide proof of United States citizenship before registration. But the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 directed the federal Election Assistance Commission to create a federal form for voter registration (current version here). That form requires applicants to provide a date of birth and other identifying information, and an oath that the applicant is a citizen, but does not require independent documentary proof of citizenship.  Federal law requires states to “accept and use” the federal form. The critical question is whether “accept and use” means that a properly completed form is sufficient for voter registration unless the state independently proves that it is fraudulent, or, rather, that the form is the beginning of an application process during which the state may freely add supplemental requirements and inquiries.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which included retired Justice O’Connor, invalidated Prop. 200’s proof-of-citizenship requirement, over a dissent by Chief Judge Kozinski. En banc, the Ninth Circuit held 9-2 that the requirement was invalid, this time with Chief Judge Kozinski in the majority. Both the panel and the court en banc Circuit upheld a separate provision of Prop. 200, requiring registered voters to show identification at the polls.

It is common ground that the federal government has broad power over federal elections.  As the Brennan Center and the Constitutional Accountability Center wrote in a brief for me and other constitutional law scholars, under the Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4), Congress may regulate federal elections and supersede state electoral laws. The Framers recognized the national implications of state electoral improprieties, and granted the national government the power to protect itself.  Neither Arizona nor any of the justices questioned the century of precedents to this effect. Instead, the case seemed to turn on the intent of Congress.