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.