In North Carolina’s first general election under the state’s photo ID requirement, 1,670 voters had their ballots rejected because they didn’t have a photo ID or properly fill out an exception form that would have likely allowed their ballot to count.
Overall, 5.72 million North Carolinians voted in the Nov. 5 election. The rejection rate works out to 1 negated ballot for every 3,428 voters.
Studies have shown that in-person voter fraud is almost non-existent.
But requiring photo ID at the polls has been a priority of North Carolina Republicans for a decade, and voters approved in 2018 a constitutional amendment requiring it.
That law was held up by numerous legal challenges, but the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court allowed photo ID to proceed in early 2023.
The state has since held several primary and municipal elections under the requirement and the rejection rate was relatively small — roughly 1 in 3,800 voters. But a general election attracts many infrequent voters and there were concerns the disqualification rate would be higher because people weren’t familiar with the new rule.
Numbers released by the state Board of Elections show that in the 2024 general election, about 6,900 North Carolinians came to vote without a photo ID. That’s about 1 in every 830 voters.
But most of them still had their vote count because they filled out a Photo ID exception form. That allows them to list a reason for not having ID, including that they lost it or they didn’t have transportation to get one.
State data show that 2,341 of those people didn’t have their ballots count. But a significant portion of those voters — 671 people — weren’t rejected because of photo ID. They were rejected for other reasons, such as not being registered to vote.
- In the end, 1,670 people had their ballots rejected because they didn’t have photo ID, and many of them did not fill out the exception form.
- Of those voters, 717 were registered Democrats, 497 were unaffiliated and 417 were registered Republicans.
- By race and ethnicity, 622 were white and 502 were Black.
Black voters are expected to make up roughly 20% of the electorate in North Carolina. They make up 30% of people whose ballots were rejected because of photo ID.
There’s still one pending federal lawsuit over the photo ID law, which was brought by the NAACP. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs hasn’t made a ruling since the trial was held in May.
