TO THE EDITOR:
While striking a moderate pose by endorsing the Justice Department lawsuit against North Carolina’s voter ID law, The Daily Tar Heel is betraying students by suggesting in its Oct. 2 editorial that recently-passed voter restrictions could make our state “a national leader in voter fraud prevention.”
In fact, there is no significant voter impersonation in North Carolina or anywhere else in the United States. Years of controversy over these measures have failed to turn up more than a tiny handful of such cases, all of which were easily handled by existing laws.
Instead of solving a nonexistent problem, the voter ID law is a blatant effort to block students and minorities from exercising their constitutional rights to vote. Why is the Tar Heel afraid to say so?
The voter ID law attacks the rights of students at Carolina and every other school in the state by banning the use of college ID cards for identification purposes, cutting the early-voting period and ending same-day registration, all measures used heavily by actual or potential student voters. The law also injures rising first-year students by ending preregistration of high school students.
How about it, Tar Heel? Who do you really represent — your student readers or the politicians who want to stifle them?
And what are students’ real problems — phony charges of voter fraud, or brutal budget cuts that hammer our school, force tuition increases, cancel classes and programs, undermine the value of a Carolina diploma and make it harder to graduate?
Harry Watson
Professor
History
