Voting requirements as clear as mud

Our opinion/ North Dakotans were stymied by new Voter ID law

Since Election Day, stories have been pouring in across North Dakota from voters not allowed to vote because of requirements from the state’s new Voter ID law. This year was the first general election vote following the ND Legislature’s enactment of the law.

In particular, many college students were unable to vote on Election Day because they had moved shortly before the election. The problem, however, seems to be not the law itself but an arbitrary requirement by North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger saying that voters must register a change of address 30 days before Election Day. So even if your ID was correct, if it wasn’t registered 30 days before Election Day, you wouldn’t have been allowed to vote. Why this was necessary is unclear. He claims it was contained in the law, but others disagree.

The biggest problem with this requirement is that neither state nor the university system did an adequate job of educating the voters on this requirement, something Jaeger later publicly admitted. The Secretary of State’s office did spend thousands of dollars on an ad campaign telling voters that voting in North Dakota was “easy as pie,” however, it is an understatement that they should’ve made the 30 day requirement a larger part of the campaign. It was mostly just clear that people had to live in their district 30 days before Election Day.

This affected students the most because many live with their parents during the summer and need to update a change of their address as soon as the school year starts. All of this calls into question the intent of the new law and the Secretary of State. It clearly wasn’t easy as pie for everyone; it was clear as mud. We were told the intention was to prevent voter fraud, a problem that didn’t seem rampant in the state before the law was passed.

Was the real goal to prevent young people and students from voting? It doesn’t take a very cynical person to extrapolate that a fear of those voters’ traditions of voting for the party other than the one of the Secretary of State and the North Dakota Legislature’s majority may have factored in. With more young people moving to the state because of a booming economy, perhaps it was believed in a tight election, this could make a difference.

Regardless of what happened Tuesday, if that was not the Secretary of State’s objective with this new law, he should take steps to rectify it. Maybe the law needs to be amended in the next Legislative session. Ideally, he shouldn’t make deadlines for registering an address before Election Day, especially if it wasn’t already included in the law. Why 30 days? Why not one day? Why not make it easy as possible for voters to vote? Turnout isn’t always the greatest during a non-Presidential year, so why not boost those numbers by not making voters jump through hoops they weren’t told about. Even some county auditors were surprised by the 30-day registration deadline imposed by Jaeger.

We say we want young people to become more involved and not be cynical about government and the process of voting and then North Dakota goes and does something that seems to be specifically targeted at preventing them from voting. It’s safe to say no fraud was prevented here but rather a disenfranchisement of younger voters. There was nothing nefarious about these students wanting to vote; they were legitimate residents of the state who deserved the right to vote like anyone else.

Until Jaeger does more than say “hindsight usually makes us a lot smarter,” and “we followed the law,” that alienation will continue. Hopefully, some members of the Legislature will put their duty over the party and rectify this situation. But past history tells us they won’t be in a rush to change things if it doesn’t benefit them. Of course Legislators and the Secretary of State can stand tall and proud for preventing any major voter fraud this past Election Day -- voter fraud that was previously unseen or unheard of in North Dakota before the law was enacted.