Every vote counts

As the Senate debates the SAVE Act, a look at North Carolina's history of restricting voting.

Welcome back to Down from DC, your guide to how decisions made by the president and Congress affect our lives here in North Carolina.

The Senate this week took up debate on the SAVE America Act, a sweeping bill that President Trump is pushing, which would require proof of citizenship and make other changes to how we vote.

The prospect of the GOP-controlled Congress making it harder for Americans to vote this year has me thinking about the history of voter suppression in North Carolina, which dates back to the Jim Crow era (for more on that, read Thomas Mills’ post this week in Politics NC) and why people in power would want to try to pick and choose who gets to vote, especially in a politically divided state like ours. It may sound like a cliche from civics class, but in this state we are getting a real-time reminder that every vote really does count.

Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page proved that in his primary race this month to unseat State Sen. Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the Senate and by all accounts the most powerful Republican in the state. Page declared victory on Election Night with a lead of just two votes. By the time absentee and provisional ballots were counted last week, that lead had grown to 23. Now that Berger has asked for a recount, the race could easily drag on for months, but the value of a single vote should be clear to all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike.

I learned last year just how precarious the exercise can be.

It was just after the 2024 election, when North Carolinians supported Trump in the presidential race, Democrat Josh Stein for governor, and a handful of other Democrats and Republicans for statewide office including Democrat Allison Riggs to the state Supreme Court.

Riggs beat Jefferson Griffin, a justice on the state court of appeals, by 734 votes, but rather than concede, Griffin challenged 65,000 ballots, among them mine.

Griffin claimed that most of those ballots shouldn’t count because records from the voters who cast them were missing key information. He also challenged 5,509 ballots from voters like me who were overseas during the election and used the online portal that was designed to make it simple for soldiers deployed abroad to vote. The portal did not ask for a photo ID, which Griffin argued should disqualify the ballots. He had no way of knowing how I voted, only that I lived in Forsyth County, one of six urban, Democratic-leaning counties he targeted in his complaint.

It had never occurred to me until months later, when I was reading about Griffin’s challenge, that I might be denied this most basic right of citizenship.

After a recount by the N.C. Board of Elections upheld the vote, Griffin appealed to the N.C. Supreme Court, which sided with him on the absentee ballots like mine. Finally, in May, six months after the election, federal district court judge Richard Myers (a Trump appointee) ruled that there was nothing wrong with my ballot or the thousands of others Griffin had challenged. Riggs is now one of two Democrats on the N.C. Supreme Court, but the question of which North Carolinians may lose their right to vote this year remains.

Proof of citizenship

After Griffin’s challenge to my vote, this week’s debate over the SAVE Act feels more personal.

The Act would require voters everywhere to show photo ID at the polls. Doing so is already currently required in N.C. and supported by most Americans. It would also require proof citizenship to register to vote. The House passed the bill last month along party lines and this week the Senate began what is expected to be a long debate, with Democrats promising to filibuster to prevent a vote.

On its face, proof of citizenship sounds reasonable. But millions of American citizens lack the kind of proof that’s required by the bill, which puts them at risk of losing their right to vote. Voter fraud is rare, including by people who are not citizens. A review of voter rolls found they contained a minute number – fewer than 0.02 percent - of people who were not U.S. citizens. The study did not examine whether any of them had voted.

Here’s a rundown of an earlier version of the SAVE Act provided by the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. The Senate version may differ slightly.

• Federal law is clear that only U.S. citizens are permitted to vote in federal and state elections. Currently, states decide how to enforce this requirement. All states require new voters to attest to their U.S. citizenship when they register, and all states conduct voter list maintenance to identify potentially ineligible voters on the rolls. How they do that varies.

• The SAVE America Act would require states to collect and document proof of citizenship from voters, which few states currently do, and establish additional voter list maintenance processes. A recent University of Maryland study indicates that as many as 21 million eligible voters do not have easy access to documents proving citizenship.

• The bill would implement a strict photo ID requirement for federal elections and specify the types of identification accepted. While 36 states currently have voter ID requirements to vote, state approaches vary. Just 10 states fall into the strict photo ID category, as defined by NCSL.

• The bill’s identification requirements also specify that a voter ID document must indicate that the individual identified is a U.S. citizen. A handful of states denote citizenship status directly on driver’s licenses, and while applicants for REAL ID cards provide documentary evidence of citizenship status, the cards display the same gold star insignia for a citizen as for a lawfully present noncitizen. Currently, each state determines the types of ID acceptable to vote, and that often includes student IDs, hunting and fishing licenses or other state-specific identification cards.

• The bill would require voters registering to vote by mail to submit documentary proof of citizenship, which states do not currently require. It is unclear how the bill would affect online voter registration, which is an option in 42 states.

• The bill would require voters applying for and submitting absentee/mail ballots to submit a photocopy of their identification at both steps in the process, which most states do not currently do.

• The bill does not authorize federal funding for the new state responsibilities it creates, and it includes no phase-in period.

• States that can’t comply might face running state and federal elections separately, with separate procedures, or they might have to keep separate lists of voters who have not provided proof of citizenship and permit them to vote only in state or local races. Arizona already has such a “bifurcated” process, which has seen a stream of litigation dating to 2004.

• The bill would require states to run their voter lists through the Systematic Alien Verification of Eligibility system to identify potential noncitizens on the voter rolls. Many, though not all, states use this system as one resource for identifying potential noncitizens, but not at the frequency this bill envisions. There are also questions about the personal voter information states would be asked to provide to run records through the database.

Regardless of what happens in the Senate, the GOP’s push for stricter ID is gaining momentum. Last week, Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature passed a law, which takes effect after the midterms, requiring proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote. And the N.C. Board of Elections is also considering rules to require proof of citizenship starting in May, just in time for voter registration for the November general election.

NC Local’s Jacob Biba has an FAQ on the restrictions the state is considering. In a nutshell, the state board will compare its voter rolls with a database run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called the Systematic Alien Verification of Eligibility system to identify registered voters who may not be citizens. Local election officials would notify the flagged voter and hold a hearing to determine their eligibility to vote through documentation like a birth certificate or a passport.

Again, the proposed rule sounds reasonable, but as Biba notes, the SAVE system is considered unreliable by its critics. An audit of the 2016 election by the N.C. Board of Elections found the federal database is not up to date and misses people who became citizens through naturalization. All told, that audit identified 41 noncitizens who cast ballots out of nearly 5 million voters. Compare that to the thousands of North Carolinians who lack the documents required by the new rules to prove citizenship.

The War in Iran

We still don’t know much about deployments for the 100,000 troops based in N.C. We learned last week that soldiers from Fort Bragg with the 3rd Battalion of the 27th Field Artillery Regiment are part of the fight, brought in for their expertise with a new weapon called a precision strike missile. The Pentagon has not disclosed where in the Middle East those soldiers are deployed or exactly where in Iran those strikes landed. The Pentagon is also not discussing whether other N.C.-based troops are involved in the war or what their role might be.

The war, launched by President Trump without Congressional approval, has spread throughout the Middle East. More than 800,000 civilians in Lebanon and 3 million in Iran are displaced, and according to NPR, it cost the U.S. $16.5 billion in just the first 12 days. So far, 13 U.S. troops have been killed, 16 people in the Gulf States, 14 Israelis, 770 Lebanese, and 1,200 Iranian civilians – among them 165 children and adults in an apparent U.S. strike at a school.

The Washington Post reported this week that the Pentagon has asked Trump for a $200 billion budget request to Congress. At a press conference Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegspeth called on Congress to fund an unspecified amount for the war. “It takes money to kill bad guys,” he said.

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