The North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE) has announced that it is accepting applications from educational institutions and government agencies so their student and employee IDs can be used for voting purposes in 2025 and 2026.
The board noted in the announcement that employer and college IDs are a large part of the plethora of cards that were accepted as voter IDs in 2023 and 2024:
“In the last election cycle, more than 100 educational and government institutions had their IDs approved for voting purposes, and we hope that number increases in 2025,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections. “The State Board is ready to assist these schools and government agencies as they work through the approval process.” [emphasis in the original]
Voter ID is a “commonsense security measure” that helps secure and promote confidence in elections.
We have our current voter ID law after a decade of debate and a 2018 referendum in which voters comfortably approved adding an ID requirement to the state constitution. The General Assembly followed up by passing an enacting law a month later over Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto. That law included an extensive section on “approval of student identification cards for voting identification.”
General Assembly Loosened Requirements for Student IDs
There is no problem with using educational IDs as long as they are held to rigorous standards that make them as reliable as official state IDs. The original law had those protections, and several education institutions had their IDs approved for voting, including Appalachian State University, Duke University, Elizabeth City State University, Meredith College, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, Shaw University, St. Augustine University, and UNC Asheville.
The ID process at most UNC system schools, including UNC-Chapel Hill, was substandard, however. They could have worked to bring their process up to the same standards as other IDs used for voting. Instead, they asked the General Assembly. Legislators, perhaps fearing that having too many college IDs excluded from the list of IDs acceptable for voting, obliged. They passed H646 in early 2029. The bill weakened college voter ID requirements in three ways:
-Effectively eliminating the requirement that the institution confirm the social security number, citizenship status, and birth date of the cardholder without specifying what are other acceptable means of confirming the identity of the cardholder or at least specifically subjecting those alternate means to prior approval by the NC State Board of Elections. (see GS 163A-1145.2.(a)(1)b in H646)
-Eliminating the requirement that ID photos be taken by the institution or is agents or contractors. The new language requires that institutions explain how they will ensure that the photo on the ID is that of an actual student or employee but, once again, the new language does not lay out an acceptable alternative process or specify that the process must get prior approval by the State Board of Elections. (GS 163A-1145.2.(a)(1)a)
-Removes the specific obligations of officials (the “chancellor, president, or registrar” in the case of colleges or universities) to confirm “under penalty of perjury” that legal procedures were followed in issuing IDs that will be used for voting. Instead, the institution only has to generally state that legal procedures “will not knowingly be violated” during the ID application process. This change allows administrators to effectively claim ignorance of violations of legal procedures on their watch by removing any obligation for them to positively confirm that their process is in compliance with the law. (GS 163A-1145.2.(a)(1))
(Note that statutes have been re-coded since H646 was passed. What was 163A-1145.2. is now 163-166.17.)
In addition, the SBE approved regulations in 2023 that required local election officials to accept ballots from those who did not present an ID but instead completed an exception affidavit “even in cases in which the county board, through a majority vote, found that they have grounds to believe the affidavit is false.”
Between the weakening of requirements for college IDs and the allowance of ballots without ID to be counted, even when election boards believe that the affidavit accompanying that ballot is false, North Carolina’s voter ID law is softer than it should be.
