College students in North Carolina would be barred from using their campus identification cards to vote in state and national elections, according to a bill state lawmakers approved on Thursday that critics say will drive young people away from the polls.
Touted by conservative lawmakers in the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly as a way to combat voter fraud, the legislation would also limit early voting and ban voter-registration drives for high-school students. Democrats and legal experts called the plan “repressive.”
“It’s clearly targeting student voters,” said Diana Kasdan, senior counsel at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “They tend to vote Democratic, and it’s a Republican-controlled state legislature that passed it.”
The bill, HB 589, passed in the Senate, 33 to 14, and the House, 73 to 41. CNN reported on Friday that Gov. Patrick L. McCrory, a Republican, said he would sign the bill. North Carolina thus will join Texas as states that have recently outlawed college IDs as valid forms of identification at the polls.
Thirty states over all have some kind of voter-ID law on the books. The North Carolina bill was given new life after the U.S. Supreme Court last month restricted enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, allowing Southern and other states to change their voting laws without advance approval by the U.S. Department of Justice.
When the bill becomes law, the Justice Department could still challenge it as intentionally discriminatory, as Democrats have said that such laws also make it harder for poor and minority voters to get to the polls. Attorney General Eric H. Holder announced on Thursday that the department would challenge Texas’ voter-ID law, which was passed in 2011 but gained teeth after the Supreme Court decision.
Students ‘at the Front Lines’
Justin Levitt, an associate professor of law at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, in Los Angeles, said that, at best, Republican lawmakers were being insensitive to the circumstances of college students, who often come from out of state or do not have driver’s licenses. At worst, he said, the Republicans were punishing students for their leftward tilt at the polls.
“Students tend to find themselves, if not explicitly targeted, then caught up in the mix,” he said. “Because students are mobile, they have to reregister more often, so students are often at the front lines of those decisions even when it’s not intentional.”
NYU’s Ms. Kasdan added that college students in North Carolina could still obtain a free voter-ID card if they did not have a driver’s license.
The bill that passed on Thursday might still be a better deal for college students than what North Carolina state senators had initially proposed. In April, SB 667 included a provision that would have penalized parents whose college-student children registered to vote using a campus address.
The Senate provision, which was removed from the final bill this summer, said that college students could not be considered as dependents on their parents’ state income taxes if they did not vote in their hometowns. If legislators had gone ahead with that provision, they would have shown that they misunderstood college students’ lifestyles, Mr. Levitt said.
“A fair number of legislators assume that students’ real address is wherever their parents live, and they’re not really at home when they’re in school,” he said. “That assumption is right for a few students but not for a lot of others.” Instead, Mr. Levitt added, residency should be “the state of mind of the individual.”
Ohio almost went further to restrict student voting this year. House Republicans in that state had pushed for an amendment that would have forced colleges to charge lower in-state tuition to nonresident students who registered to vote in Ohio, a key swing state in presidential elections. The measure, which would have clobbered tuition revenue, faced sharp resistance from college leaders, and was dropped by the State Senate.
A Heated Debate
The debate over the North Carolina bill came to a head on Thursday, as Sen. Gladys A. Robinson, a Democrat, pointed to higher education as the jewel of the state. “Our colleges and universities and community colleges make our state rich, so these students should have the right to exercise these voting privileges,” Ms. Robinson said.
Republicans, however, painted the effort as one that would add integrity to elections. Sen. Ronald J. Rabin, a Republican, argued on the floor of the State Senate that the bill was not suppressive.
“These are the things that protect my rights and the integrity of my vote,” Mr. Rabin said. “I do not want a system, personally, when it comes to my vote, that models on the American Idol, where everyone can just dial it up and vote who they want to vote for and we can’t count how many times they’re voting.”
Research shows, however, that voter fraud is rare. In a report, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” the Brennan Center for Justice says the push for stronger photo-ID restrictions is particularly unnecessary.
“Such photo-ID laws,” the report says, “are effective only in preventing individuals from impersonating other voters at the polls—an occurrence more rare than getting struck by lightning.”