Voter ID law repeats history

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham bombings, a youth-specific Moral Monday rally was held earlier this week in Raleigh, led by students and the N.C. NAACP.

Over the past few months, the recent changes in state voting laws have been one of the key subjects of Moral Monday protests and general dissatisfaction with our state lawmakers.

We may be past the times of discriminatory literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses, but this does not mean our vote isn’t being oppressed.

The N.C. legislature is effectively disenfranchising the youth vote of the state.

A new voter ID law was first proposed in 2011, but former Gov. Bev Perdue vetoed the Republican-backed Restore Confidence in Government Act.

Then-gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory was in support of the bill in order to protect the election system from voter fraud.

However, investigations done by the State Board of Elections from 2004-10 found that for every one million votes cast in North Carolina, only five votes involved a type of fraud that this voter ID law would have stopped.

Although this bill did not pass, after McCrory was sworn into office earlier this year, he signed into law some new voting requirements — many of which heavily affect college students.

Not only does the new law require a photo ID, but it no longer allows poll officials to accept college IDs or out-of-state driver’s licenses. This forces out-of-state students to vote in their home state if they want to exercise this right, though they were granted the ability to vote in their college towns per the 1979 Supreme Court case Symm v. United States.

Coincidentally, the Symm case was based upon discriminatory procedures that didn’t allow students at Prairie View A&M University, a predominantly black institution, to vote in local elections.

But the changes don’t end with the so-called identification concerns. The law also shortens early voting by a week and cuts out same-day voter registration completely.

Since the bill has passed, organizations like the N.C. NAACP have filed lawsuits against Gov. McCrory, claiming that the law weakens the African-American vote. In the 2012 election, about 70 percent of African-Americans who voted did so by taking advantage of the early voting option.

Voting is not a privilege. It is our right as American citizens. Everything should be done to make sure that everyone is able to fulfill this right, but it feels like the opposite is happening.

Change needs to happen, and the Moral Monday protests have made citizens more aware of what is going on in the state and how it affects them.

Although no changes have been made to laws yet, the demonstrations are essential simply because they let lawmakers know that we want an active role in our government and that laws like this will be combated.

As college students, we need to watch this issue closely and take part in securing our future.