Dr. William Barber on the New Voting Suppression Law

by Moe White

Speaking in Asheville, Dr. Barber was eloquent about the immorality of the state’s new “Voter ID” law, stricter even than those in Alabama, Texas, and other bastions of the old Jim Crow South.

“Now [legislators] want to rig elections so that the people won’t be able to get rid of them. They’ve passed the most regressive, race-based voter suppression law in all fifty states.

Even the Speaker of the House, Thom Tillis … admits that there is no real voter fraud in North Carolina… of a total of 21 million votes cast in North Carolina in recent years, they were able to discover exactly ONE incident of fraud—and it was fraud that wouldn’t be caught by the new law.

“And what did Senator Apodaca [R-Henderson] say when the Supreme Court overturned Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act? He said, ‘The headache has been removed.’”

“That is the same language used in the 1870s when the federal troops were removed from the South, leaving the door open for Jim Crow laws and all the other voter suppression that they were waiting to enact.”

Among the voting rights that have been removed are:

•     same-day registration;

•     Sunday voting;

•     a full week of early voting;

•     pre-registration for high school students about to turn 18;

•     the use of student IDs and other traditional forms of ID as proof of identity;

•     the right of college students to vote where they live without a financial penalty to their parents

Barber continued, “They’ve removed three sources of public financing for elections and raised the limit on contributions to campaigns and removed the requirement to identify big-money donors and to identify the sponsor of the advertisement—none of which has anything to do with voter fraud, and they admit it.”

Furthermore, noted Barber, under the new law any registered voter in a county can challenge anyone lined up to vote, without any reason or evidence of wrongdoing. Thus a cadre of conservatives can legally show up at primarily African American precincts and systematically challenge the right to vote of every black voter they see.

“Article VI, Section 1 of the North Carolina Constitution states that the only qualification to vote in North Carolina is to be 18 and be born or naturalized a U.S. citizen. Such vigilante poll observers would be a crime against democracy.”