One of the sneakiest things about North Carolina's 2023 voter suppression bill, S.B. 747, is how it disenfranchises rural communities across our state.
The North Carolina state legislature, along party lines, passed a sweeping package of changes to state election laws ahead of the 2024 elections — including throwing out any mail-in ballots not received by Election Night, instead of the current three-day grace period after the election.
The biggest issue for rural activists is the change to the rules for same-day voter registration. S.B. 747 makes it so that many people could go to the polls, lawfully vote, and later learn — or perhaps never learn — that their vote didn’t count. This is because the new law mandates that their ballot will be thrown out if a single piece of mail sent to them after they vote by their county board of elections is returned as undeliverable. Their voter registration would be thrown out, too. And we all know how rural mail service can be unreliable.
Intricate rules like this (or states like Pennsylvania that require the voter to write the date they completed their ballot in multiple, obscure places) are not written because lawmakers don't understand how people vote. Laws like this are written specifically so that opponents of voting rights have legal avenues to throw out your ballot and invalidate your vote. The working poor and struggling middle class are most likely to get caught in this trap, not the wealthy donors who back the vote suppressors.
All voters deserve to have their voices heard in our elections, John, not to have their ballots tossed out on technicalities. Help fight these suppressive and disenfranchising laws with $25 or whatever you can today and protect voting rights across the country >>
