Bad bills, good bills: Election integrity
Image via State Archives of North Carolina Raleigh, NC, Set 72157632242025945, ID 8271463337, Original title T-73-2-1LegBldgbyClayNolan
This issue of “Bad Bills—Good Bills” is all about election integrity. Two pieces of legislation introduced in this session illustrate the wrong way and the right way to ensure that the voices of the people are heard by government.
Bad Bills
First, the wrong way. On June 1, 2023, three Republican senators, Ralph Hise, Paul Newton, and Warren Daniel, introduced Senate Bill 747, (the North Carolina General Assembly’s [GA] web page for the bill is here) “Election Law Changes” which provides that absentee ballots must be received at the Board of Elections by 7:30 PM on election day. This is a change from current law, which requires that ballots be postmarked by election day and received not more than three days later. It’s not clear how this improves election integrity, but it certainly means that more ballots, delayed in the mail, will arrive too late to be counted. The bill also requires both software verification of all signatures and two witnesses or a notary for all mail-in ballots. No other state has such strict requirements for mail-in ballots (N&O story from July 9, 2023 here). These—and other—GOP changes to election laws are designed to look reasonable, but fix no real problems, while making it harder to vote, and more likely that a valid vote will not be counted. SB 747 has passed the Senate, and now will be reviewed and possibly further modified in the House.
Bottom line, the problem with elections here in North Carolina isn’t that too many invalid votes are counted, but that too many valid votes don’t count, because the Republican-controlled General Assembly has gerrymandered legislative districts to their benefit. This leads us to …
Good Bills
House Bill 9, (GA web page is here) filed on January 25, 2023, is the Fair Maps Act. It amends the NC Constitution to provide for an independent redistricting process, establishing an independent redistricting commission to replace the process we have now, in which the majority party in the GA controls the redistricting process. The four primary House sponsors for the bill are Pricey Harrison, Marcia Morey, Robert T. Reives, and Diamond Staton-Williams. Unfortunately, HB 9 never got out of committee, and so it never got a floor vote. It is dead for this legislative session.
In the last election for the US Senate, 1,905,786 North Carolinians voted for Ted Budd, the Republican candidate, with1,784,049 casting their ballots for Democrat Cheri Beasley. So Republicans had 52%, and Democrats 48%, of the two-party vote. By comparison, in the race for Governor in 2020, Democrat Roy Cooper received 2,834,790 votes with Republican Dan Forest getting 2,586,605. That is, 52% and 48% of the two-party vote respectively for the two candidates. Same percentages as above, just in the opposite direction. The point is, the two parties are pretty much equally balanced when it comes to state-wide elections, which means that personal details of the candidates can matter in a single election. At the same time, because Republicans hold 60% of the seats in both the House and Senate (and the bulk of those seats are 'safe’), it is difficult for a Democratic challenger to overcome the built-in imbalance of party affiliation in any given district.
In short, gerrymandering is an old practice, but modern computer techniques make it wickedly effective. The only way around it—and to restore fairness to NC elections—is to give responsibility for redistricting to an independent commission solely charged with making fair maps in which every voter’s vote counts.