The low number of young people voting this year was no accident, nor was it disaffection by many of the young people.
House Bill 589 which made changes to the bureaucratic rules regulating voter registration/address changes which it seems were designed to eliminate them from the rolls of active voters.
No longer are high school students registered actively in high schools by the local Boards of Election.
Apparently the DMV has stopped registering them with their new drivers’ licenses, claiming it is too complicated to figure out the birthday as it relates to their first eligible election. Of course this is a straw man since the Board of Election managed to seamlessly accomplish this task for years.
And unfortunately forms sent by the bureaucracy generated by DMV license address changes have the effect of eliminating voters from the rolls in their old county without generating an address change and new registration in their new county.
These changes require the voter to fill out additional, unspecified paperwork to stay registered to vote, which is a right not a privilege. Of course all these bureaucratic machinations could be solved if Governor McCrory would simply endorse the 4th Circuit’s ruling and allow for same day registration and out of precinct provisional voting. Instead, he stopped the Federal Court from allowing them this year.
I know this to be true because my daughter and my son-in-law, who are frequent voters were disenfranchised this past election in Wake County due to the operation of law.
They were transformed from frequent registered voters to unregistered citizens without their knowledge and by the time they became aware of the problem they were ineligible to vote.
This is wrong. This is UnAmerican. And this bureaucratic nonsense designed to disenfranchise voters needs to be fixed.
Virginia Penley, Chapel Hill
