After state and national Republican leaders sued North Carolina to stop the state from accepting virtual ID cards used at UNC-Chapel Hill from being considered a legal form of voter photo identification, the Democratic National Committee is now seeking to intervene in the lawsuit and have it thrown out.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign supported the move, Harris’ lead spokesperson in North Carolina Dory MacMillan told WRAL in an exclusive announcement of the new legal effort.
“This MAGA Republican lawsuit is nothing more than a political effort to keep eligible young voters from being able to cast their ballots,” MacMillan said. “But we will not let them win. With our fundamental freedoms on the line, team Harris-Walz will continue fighting to ensure every eligible voter has a chance to cast their ballot in this election.”
A court hearing over the ID issue is scheduled for Thursday in Wake County Superior Court.
Republicans are seeking to stop UNC’s mobile “One Card” ID from being used as a form of voter ID. College students don’t vote at nearly the same level as older adults, but when they do they tend to disproportionately favor Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign has spent substantial resources trying to ramp up engagement efforts on college campuses in North Carolina and other swing states ahead of the Nov. 5 election. But Republicans haven’t fought efforts to approve other college student IDs as voter IDs — just the UNC digital identification card.
The GOP lawsuit says only physical ID cards, not electronic ones, should be allowed under the new voter ID law that’s being used this year for the first time in a major election. They’ve said that if there are questions about the validity of someone’s ID, poll workers should be allowed to make a photocopy of it — but it’s unclear how that would be possible to do using an app. Democrats have dismissed the concerns, pointing out that UNC officials already made changes to their ID app, requested by state officials, to ensure that it would legally qualify for use as voter IDs.
The decision could affect any UNC student who doesn’t have a driver’s license or other form of ID — potentially thousands of people. The university automatically issues all students a digital ID card and says on its website it will only issue physical cards “on a case-by-case basis.”
The original vote to approve the UNC digital IDs came down along party lines earlier this summer at the State Board of Elections; the board’s Democratic majority outvoted the Republican dissenters 3-2.
“This lawsuit is an eleventh-hour bid to confuse and potentially disenfranchise up to 40,000 individuals who attend or work at North Carolina’s flagship state university, just weeks before they head to the polls for early voting,” the Democratic National Committee claims in its new legal filing.
The lawsuit seeking to ban the UNC IDs is one of several that the state and national Republican groups have filed in recent weeks over voting rules in North Carolina. One of the other lawsuits seeks to kick nearly 250,000 North Carolina voters off the list of registered voters — a proposal state elections officials say would be illegal to do this close to an election. Another lawsuit alleges problems with voting machines, and yet another alleges that the state hasn’t done enough to block non-citizens from voting, all claims that state elections officials deny as false.