As Melissa Boughton reported yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court passed again this week on taking any action on the monster voter suppression law enacted by the General Assembly and thrown out by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
One of the many things at stake in the case is the fate of same day registration in North Carolina, a voting procedure used as often by Republicans as Democrats and invaluable for people who have moved and didn’t have time to change their registration or folks who are eligible to vote and simply missed the deadline to sign up.
It’s no coincidence that a report from Nonprofit Vote finds the six states with the highest turnout in the 2016 election all have same-day registration in place while the five states with the lowest turnout do not.
And in case you missed it, one of the folks that NC GOP Chair Robin Hayes says he will appoint to the new combined elections and ethics board created by the General Assembly if the courts reject Gov. Cooper’s latest efforts to stop it is Francis De Luca, head of the Pope Civitas Institute.
(Last week, a court issued a temporary restraining order preventing the new board from being created.)
De Luca and Civitas are committed to ending same-day registration and even filed a lawsuit after the November election challenging the practice that has prevented more than 400,000 eligible voters, Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated alike, from from being turned away from the polls since 2007.
A lot of people on the Right continue to work awfully hard to make sure it’s more difficult for their fellow citizens to vote.