Vote-by-mail changes aren’t enough to protect from coronavirus, NC lawsuit says
Elderly voters and those with increased coronavirus risks shouldn’t have to potentially endanger their health to vote this November, a new lawsuit says.
The national American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU’s North Carolina chapter and several individual voters sued state lawmakers and elections officials Friday morning. Their goal is to eliminate North Carolina’s requirement that anyone who votes by mail must have someone else witness them voting and then sign their ballot, in order for it to count.
“No one should be forced to choose between their health and their vote,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Removing the witness requirements in the middle of a deadly pandemic just makes sense. It is an obvious and common-sense solution that protects people’s health and their right to vote.”
In North Carolina, unlike in many other states, anyone can vote by mail if they want. No specific reasons or excuses are required.
North Carolina typically requires people voting by mail to have two witnesses, although the legislature voted last month to reduce that to one witness, only for 2020, due to health concerns over coronavirus.
The new law also makes it easier to request mail-in ballots, and it has measures aimed at making in-person voting safer like increased funding for public heath supplies at polling places. Officials expect that absentee voting by mail might grow tenfold this year because of coronavirus concerns, from the normal 4% or 5% of voters to as high as 40%.
Bipartisan support
The law passed nearly unanimously last month. A spokesperson for N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican from Cleveland County, said the ACLU and other challengers should respect that bipartisan stamp of approval for the law they’re trying to overturn.
“The General Assembly and governor approved further bipartisan accommodations to North Carolina’s absentee voting laws that already allow any voter cast their ballot by mail for any reason,” said Joseph Kyzer, Moore spokesman, in an email. “Bipartisan changes to election laws should be made by lawmakers and the governor, and not be interfered with by courts and partisan activist groups.”
The ACLU lawsuit, however, says the legislature acknowledged the risks posed to mail-in voters by the witness requirement when lawmakers reduced it from two witnesses to just one.
The lawsuit says the witness requirement will “necessitate face-to-face and hand-to-hand interaction between voters and others who pose a potentially fatal risk to the voter’s health.”
The lawsuit claims the government has no valid interest in requiring the ballots to be witnessed.
‘Ballot harvesting’ allegations
But the 2018 scandal in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District — which drew national attention — remains fresh in people’s minds.
North Carolina ordered a new election due to allegations of a ballot harvesting scheme that helped the candidate who originally appeared on the ballot to narrowly win.
A GOP operative in Bladen County named McCrae Dowless was accused of running a fraudulent absentee ballot scheme on behalf of the original Republican candidate in the race, Mark Harris. Harris hasn’t been charged with any crimes, but Dowless and some of his workers have. They’re accused of several crimes, including taking and mailing in ballots from people they weren’t related to — known as ballot harvesting —and, in some cases, filling in people’s ballots for them.
The ACLU lawsuit does not directly address that specific example, although it says if someone wants to commit fraud with absentee ballots, the current witness signature rules won’t stop that from happening. The main effect of the witness rule, the lawsuit argues, is to potentially disenfranchise voters worried about their health.
“While North Carolina election officials check for the presence of a signature and address, they do nothing to verify this information,” the lawsuit says. “Thus, as a practical matter, the witness requirements pose no obstacle to deter an individual who is willing to commit perjury and cast an absentee ballot fraudulently.”
The lawsuit says only 12 states require a witness requirement for mail-in ballots. And at least one of those states, Virginia, recently agreed to eliminated its witness requirement for the state’s June primary elections as part of a lawsuit that the ACLU was also involved in there.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 4:51 PM with the headline "Vote-by-mail changes aren’t enough to protect from coronavirus, NC lawsuit says."
