John Locke Foundation head John Hood’s column this week looks at the Left’s claim that changes in voting procedures enacted by the Republican-controlled General Assembly amounted to voter suppression. The beginning of the article:
Liberals are desperate to prove that North Carolina’s new election law constitutes the second coming of Jim Crow-era voter suppression. Their desperation reflects three desires.
First, they want to win a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law, which included provisions that changed the early-voting calendar, ended the practice of registering and voting on the same day, required that voters cast their ballots in their own precincts, and (by 2016) instituted a photo ID requirement in order to vote.
The Left’s second desire is to challenge the policy decisions of the Republican-led General Assembly not in civil court but in the court of public opinion, by arguing that they are fruits of a poisoned tree (that is, voter suppression). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many liberals want to pretend they are refighting the movement for civil rights. It makes them feel noble and powerful.
I suspect they’ll need to find another means of self-glorification, however, because the “voter suppression” bandwagon just lost another wheel. Even before the 2014 midterms, when most of the new rules took effect for the first time, there was ample reason to believe that North Carolina electoral participation wouldn’t be much affected by the changes. Statistical correlations between, say, the number of days of early voting and voter turnout are hard to come by.
Now that the state board of elections has released the latest turnout data, the Left’s weak argument has become a nonsensical one. In North Carolina, voter participation was higher in 2014 than it was in 2010, the last midterm election. More than 2.9 million voted this year, accounting for 44.3 percent of registered voters. In 2010, 43.3 percent of registered voters turned out.
You can read the rest of John’s column here.
