The General Assembly’s narrow Republican supermajority is poised to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of an elections bill.
GOP lawmakers say the measure will strengthen election integrity in the state, but in his veto message last week, Cooper said the legislation “has nothing to do with election security and everything to do with Republicans keeping and gaining power.” The governor warned the bill would “erect new barriers for younger and non-white voters” and “encourages voter intimidation at the polls by election deniers and conspiracy believers.”
Perhaps the most significant change in the proposal is the elimination of a three-day grace period for counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day. The bill would also expand access for partisan poll watchers.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The settlement infuriated GOP lawmakers, who accused Stein and the elections board of colluding with Elias and the national Democratic Party to circumvent the legislature’s authority.
Daniel and fellow Republicans have pushed this legislation as a way of restoring public faith in the integrity of elections without acknowledging that much of that mistrust is rooted in baseless claims of widespread voter fraud drummed up by GOP candidates and their supporters.
Under the new bill, the observers may move about the voting area, listen to conversations between voters and precinct officials as long as the discussion pertains solely to elections administration, and go in and out of the site to communicate by telephone with party officers.
Democratic state Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed negotiated an amendment to several aspects of the bill, including the scaling back of a provision to require signature verification of absentee-by-mail ballots.
An earlier photo ID voting requirement was thrown out as part of an omnibus elections bill that a federal judge said targeted African American voters “with almost surgical precision.”
Republican lawmakers in the North Carolina General Assembly are now poised to redraw more favorable maps once again with a sympathetic state Supreme Court majority unlikely to get in their way.
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