One week ago, the Republican/Tea Party supermajority in North Carolina's General Assembly passed the most repressive, restrictive voter-suppression law in the United States. HB589, the Voter Information Verification Act(VIVA)/Election Reform Law, is a 57-page manual of how to disenfranchise voters and exclude broad swaths of us from the balloting process in North Carolina.
HB589 started out in the N.C. House as a two-page bill to require that all voters present a state-issued photo ID. But as the bill made its way through crossover to the N.C. Senate, it added a few details. It came back to the House less than 48 hours before the end of the 2013-14 legislative session with 55 additional pages that restricted voting rights, eliminated pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-olds, ended a high school civics course that educates high school students about voting, decreased the number of days of early voting, eliminated same-day registration during early voting, and offers an exhaustive list of other ways in which voting is no longer a right in North Carolina but a privilege granted by the Republican Party and its Tea Party subset to whomever it deems fit.
The bill reintroduces the historic anachronism of discriminatory poll watching, permitting political parties to appoint 10 poll challengers per precinct, plus allowing anyone at all to challenge the voter eligibility of any voter in the entire county in which the challenger resides.
(The "vigilante voter" provision is coupled with provisions in another new law, HB937, an expansion of gun rights that permit concealed-carry weapons -- CCWs -- in several venues that are also balloting sites, including school gymnasiums, recreational facilities, and municipal-run community centers. A provision in another bill to allow CCWs in another common polling venue: churches. This provision met with such vehement opposition from the faith community that was thought to have been stricken, but HB937 singles out "funeral processions" as a site where CCWs will be permitted, thus encompassing churches and church grounds, at least during funerals.)
What happens now? In addition to massive voter-registration efforts (once the State Board of Elections has prepared the new forms), we've begun legal challenges to VIVA/Election Reform.
What else happens? You. You can help us fight this odious law.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) is challenging the VIVA/Election Reform Law in court. In the meantime, SCSJ is working to ensure that all North Carolinians who are eligible to vote have the identification they need to prove at the ballot box that they are entitled to vote.
Your donation to SCSJ will help the estimated 319,000 North Carolinians who are eligible to vote prove their eligibility under the repressive new criteria.
Although VIVA/Election Reform sprang from "model legislation" prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), it wasn't something entirely new in North Carolina. ALEC started its work in our state several years ago by funding municipal and school-board candidates and sending them forward to enact policies that altered public education and voting guidelines.
Alberta Currie is 78 years old. The great-granddaughter of slaves and the mother of seven, Currie doesn't have a birth certificate, because she was born at home. With other documentation, however, she obtained her voter-registration card and has voted consistently since 1956, when she first became eligible.
When Currie first went to vote in 1956, election officials forced black voters to wait until whites had voted, holding them at the back of the line until all the white voters in the precinct had cast their ballots. In 2012, though, Currie and her daughters stood in line to be the first ones to vote on the date that early voting opened. When it was Currie's turn, however, local election officials told her that she needed a government-issued photo ID -- which Currie was unable to obtain without a birth certificate.
And now all voters in our state will have to present a birth certificate, North Carolina driver's license, military ID, passport, or state-issued photo ID to prove eligibility to vote. Hundreds of thousands of state citizens are expected to find themselves in the same situation Alberta Currie found herself in last November: victims of North Carolina's determination to relegate voting from a right to a privilege granted only to those who can meet strict criteria for eligibility.
SCSJ has been helping voters like Alberta Currie and is expanding its efforts to address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of other North Carolinians who will need documentation.
At the same time, SCSJ is fighting on the courtroom front to challenge the constitutionality of the VIVA/Election Reform Law. The organization has already established itself in North Carolina as a champion of voting rights, including challenges to elections administration practices such as those that kept Alberta Currie from casting her ballot last year.
It's heartbreaking that we North Carolinians can't simply stop the VIVA/Election Reform Law simply because we know it violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or because we know that it's morally wrong. But it is heartening to know that we have the able legal resources of the Southern Coalition of Social Justice to fight for each and every one of the estimated 319,000 North Carolinians who face immense challenges for their constitutional right to vote.
SCSJ has stood with us each and every week since we started protesting regularly in April of this year. And we know its amazing staff will see us through these historically difficult times.
Will you stand with us, too?
If you can make a one-time or recurring donation of any amount (even just $10), you're going to help us not only keep this fight alive but help us prevail.
As we say each and every Moral Monday in North Carolina: Forward together, not one step back.
March forward with us.