Neighbors on Call’s NC Policy Update for 09/16/24

Governance

• NC lawmakers approve voucher expansion, target sheriffs who won't work with ICE: Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for private school tuition were tacked onto an immigration bill that will force North Carolina sheriffs to work with ICE on detainer requests, tying two key GOP priorities together. —Will Doran, WRAL News

• NC Senate overrides five of Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes —Lynn Bonner, NC Newsline

  
  

Voting Rights 

• NC elections board sets new dates for absentee ballot availability —Lynn Bonner, NC Newsline

• Republicans sue to stop use of UNC digital ID for voting: The State Board of Education voted in August to allow University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students to use a digital identification for voting in November's elections.  —Brian Murphy, WRAL News

• Coming this November to North Carolina polling places: Partisan election ‘observers’: At precincts across the swing state, Democratic and GOP volunteers will monitor voting. —Galen Bacharier, NC Newsline

Neighbors on Call’s NC Policy Update for 09/09/24

Governance

• On Friday Republican leaders in the NCGA announced that they had reached an agreement on a “mini-budget” to address unresolved priorities from the short session that ended in June. The proposed addition to the budget would allocate $5 billion over the next decade to North Carolina’s private school voucher program, opening up vouchers to many newly eligible wealthier families that have been on the waiting list this year. In addition, the “mini-budget” bill would require sheriffs to cooperate with ICE and provide additional funding for the state Medicaid program, rural broadband, and enrollment increases in public schools and community colleges.

Voting Rights 

• 9/10/24 UPDATE: NC Supreme Court orders RFK Jr.’s name removed, counties to reprint millions of ballots  —Lynn Bonner, NC Newsline

• On Friday, 9/6/24, the day that absentee ballots were scheduled to be sent out based on state law, a state Appeals Court panel ruled that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name must be removed from ballots, overturning a decision issued the previous day by Wake County Superior Court Judge Rebecca Holt.  If the Appeals Court decision stands, ballots will need to be reprinted, causing a significant delay past the required date and costing millions of dollars. The State Board of Elections has asked the NC Supreme Court to overturn the Appeals Court ruling and instructed county elections boards to retain all ballots that have already been printed in case the court decides in their favor.

Neighbors on Call’s NC Policy Update for 09/02/24

Voting Rights

• On Monday the North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit in Wake County seeking to purge 225,000 voters from North Carolina rolls. The plaintiffs allege that voters were improperly allowed to register with forms that didn’t require registrants’ driver’s license numbers or the  last four digits of their Social Security numbers, and that the NC State Board of Elections did not respond quickly enough to a complaint to this effect. A spokesman for the NCSBE responded that federal law prohibits voter roll purges like the one requested within a 90-day window leading up to a federal election, and also said that the allegations display a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of voter registration data. Voting rights advocates decried the lawsuit as a way to spread disinformation about the accuracy of voter rolls and a tactic to disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. 

• On Thursday the NC State Board of Elections voted along party lines to keep RFK Jr. on North Carolina ballots after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. Since his decision to endorse Trump, Kennedy has sought to remove his name from ballots in key swing states to avoid taking votes away from Trump. Though the final deadline for finalizing absentee ballots for the November election is September 6, and the date ballots must be ready to be sent out is September 21, a majority of North Carolina counties have already printed their ballots, with over 1.73 million ballots printed in total. The NCSBE’s three Democratic members felt that the cost and operational challenge of reprinting millions of ballots was too high, while the two Republican members argued that there was more ambiguity in the law and therefore potentially greater leeway to reprint ballots.