North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper has issued yet another veto. The latest veto is over the Voter ID bill which supports the recently passed state constitutional amendment requiring Voter ID at the polls.

On Friday, Cooper vetoed SB 824, titled Implementation of Voter ID Const. Amendment.

The bill passed the House 86-14 and the Senate 43-0.  The 14 noes in the House came from Republicans.

Not a single Democrat opposed the bill in either chamber, but there’s Roy vetoing the “sinister” and “cynical” bill anyway.

“Having identification is not only necessary to be an active member of our society, it is constitutionally required to vote, as determined by a majority of North Carolinians,” said Lt. Governor Dan Forest in a statement. “To put partisanship ahead of common sense is not only bad for our state, it is not the leadership our state needs. I hope our General Assembly will swiftly override this veto to ensure our state’s constitution is upheld.”

Speaker Tim Moore tweeted out that the General Assembly will be overriding Cooper’s veto promptly.

Cooper’s veto message was not only overly theatrical, but it also contained an insult to the intelligence of the voters in the state.  Apparently, Governor Cooper believes his citizenry are too dumb or feeble to obtain one of the multiple forms of ID considered acceptable in SB 824.

Once again we see that there no political football on the planet that this man won’t take a kick at if he thinks it benefits him as evidenced by the first line of his veto message where Cooper now believes in vote fraud.

As Attorney General, Cooper refused to investigate or make referrals for prosecution for ballot or voter fraud. In 2013, hundreds of cases of fraud supplied by the NC Board of Elections were handed over to Cooper and he refused to do anything with them.

Cooper Thumbs His Nose at 55% of NC

There are 100 Counties in North Carolina and 82 of them voted in favor of the Voter ID Constitutional Amendment. That’s 2,049,121 (55.49% ) who voted FOR the amendment.

1,643,983 (44.51%) voted against it and guess what? The majority of those who voted against were located in Progressive/Democrat-heavy counties.

Orange: Voter ID Passed  Grey: Voter ID Opposed

What’s In the Voter ID Bill

The bill includes exceptions for those with a “reasonable impediment” barring them from obtaining one of a dozen accepted forms of ID. This impediment clause makes Cooper’s claim of suppression moot.

The same reasonable impediment clause can also be seen as a giant loophole which would allow for anyone to cast a ballot, have it counted and them disappear into the woodwork.

There is also laundry list of ID’s considered acceptable in the bill.

• North Carolina drivers license
• Special DMV issued identification card for nonoperators
• United States passport
• North Carolina voter photo identification card of the registered voter
• Tribal enrollment card issued by a State or federally recognized tribe.
• Student identification card issued by a constituent institution of The University of North Carolina, a community college or eligible private postsecondary institution
• Employee identification card issued by a state or local government
  entity
• A drivers license or special identification card for nonoperators issued
  by another state, the District of Columbia, or a territory or
  commonwealth of the United States, but only if the voter’s voter
  registration was within 90 days of the election.
• A military identification card issued by the United States government (current or expired)
• A Veterans Identification Card issued by the United States Department (current or expired)
  of Veterans Affairs for use at Veterans Administration medical
  facilities.
• Any expired form of identification allowed in this subsection presented by a
  registered voter having attained the age of 65 years at the time of presentation
  at the voting place, provided that the identification was unexpired on the
  registered voter’s sixty-fifth birthday.

One section which likely will come back to haunt the legislature is the approval of Student ID cards.

College students are a transitory population. In a previous investigation, it was discovered that the State Board of Elections  (SBOE) was already allowing college students to skirt state voter registration laws.

The SBOE was granting a dispensation to college kids by allowing mass registrations to addresses that were not, in fact, the residence of the student.

In fact, in 2016, an investigation revealed hundreds of Duke students were registered to a parking lot. A random sample of 50 of those Duke students revealed half were from out of state. Did they also vote absentee in their home state? There’s currently no easy way to know that and SB 824 does nothing to address such an issue.

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