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North Carolina’s new voter ID law will exclude the use of a college, university student ID as an adequate form of identification, according to The Seahawk.
Governor Pat McCrory signed House Bill 589 into law in August, requiring all out-of-state students to obtain a state-issued ID before being allowed to cast a ballet in any future elections. N.C. Republicans strongly supported the bill from the beginning and expressed a fear of voter fraud as the driving force behind it.
N.C. Democrats and opponents of the bill speculate it is a poised tactic by GOP-controlled state legislature to reduce the number of minority and student votes, with a disproportionate number of them being those who have historically voted democratic.
According to 2012 election data from a local NBC-affiliated television station, only 121 out of the state’s nearly 7 million ballots were referred to the appropriate district attorney as alleged cases of voter fraud.
Alyssa Guberman is an out-of-state student attending the University of North Carolina Wilmington and views the bill as an impingement on her voting rights. This bill will deny a large group of North Carolinians the right to decide who will represent them and their issues, Guberman said.
In addition to the voter ID requirement, the law also reduces the number of early-voting days from 17 to 10. Critics of the law say this will discourage people that usually take advantage of early voting from participating at all.
The new law will not go into effect until 2016.
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