After a decade of false starts — and millions of dollars spent fighting over the issue at the ballot box and in the courtroom — North Carolina voters are now required to show photo identification to cast a ballot in person.

The new voter ID requirement is a victory for conservatives. They’ve pushed for stricter voting laws, saying rules like voter ID are needed to improve voters’ faith that elections aren’t being rigged. Such concerns have skyrocketed among Republicans in recent years due to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

It’s also a setback for progressives and civil rights activists. They say the law isn’t actually intended to fight voter fraud, which is rare already. Instead, they say, it’s being put in place to make voting harder for poor people, minorities and college students — all of whom tend to support Democrats.

“Five years ago, North Carolinians made it clear that they supported enshrining in our constitution a requirement to show a photo ID to vote,” said Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, a chairman of the state senate’s election law committee. “Since then, far-left activists and their allies in the executive branch have tried everything to stop this commonsense measure from becoming a reality.”

North Carolina’s first attempt at voter ID, in 2013, was ruled unconstitutional — one piece of a broad set of election law changes that federal courts found Republican lawmakers had written to intentionally discriminate against Black voters.

State lawmakers tried again in 2018, as Newton referenced, asking voters to add an ID requirement to the state constitution. Voters agreed, and the voter ID amendment passed in 2018 with 55% support. But it had been held up in court. Then, earlier this year, the North Carolina Supreme Court signed off on voter ID, reversing the court’s own decision from just a few months prior that had found voter ID to be racially discriminatory and unconstitutional.

That judicial flip-flop coincided with the elected Supreme Court’s majority shifting from Democrats to Republicans. It allowed voter ID rules to go into place starting Thursday, when the first city council races of 2023 began.

How voters are reacting so far

Voter ID’s critics fear it could lower Black voter turnout, potentially hurting Democrats’ chances in future elections while also continuing the state’s history of disenfranchising minorities. In North Carolina, 98% of Black voters are either registered as Democrats or are unaffiliated.

Past studies have shown that even though most people do have photo identification, people who lack IDs are disproportionately Black — and, particularly, tend to be older Black residents. Many of the people who cast the state’s very first ballots using the new voter ID rules fit that exact demographic, and several told WRAL they didn’t mind the new rules.

“They need to make sure you are who you say you are,” said William Richardson, one of the first 10 people to cast a ballot in Sanford’s ongoing city council primary.

Another Sanford Democrat and early voter, Tennessee Richmond, has a long history of participating in local elections. She also said she had no problems adjusting to the new process.

“No, no, it was just fine,” she said.

Jane Rae Fawcett, the Lee County elections director who’s in charge of overseeing that Sanford primary, said she has been talking about voter ID in recent weeks to the local newspaper and radio stations, to try to raise awareness. She said she didn’t anticipate any problems for now; the tiny county’s only early voting site is at the county elections office, so all the experts will be just a few feet away in case any issues do crop up in the coming days.

“If we have any problems, we should be able to handle those pretty quickly,” she said. “And I don’t think there will be, since these days most people have ID.”

It’s more complicated in Charlotte, the state’s biggest city and the only other place with an election happening right now. There are more elections on the ballot, more people expected to show up to vote, and 10 early voting sites for election officials to monitor — not just one.

Michael Dickerson, the Mecklenburg County elections director, told WRAL before voting started that he planned to ramp up staffing more than normal so that more poll workers get experience with the new rules, ahead of the busier elections this fall and beyond.

“We are probably a little heavy for this primary in terms of workers, but the idea is to make certain our workers are comfortable with the changes,” he said.

And once voting started Thursday, he said late in the day, things had gone smoothly.

“No problem today, and no issues with the photo ID,” Dickerson said.

Other places around the state that don’t have elections at the moment are nevertheless working on making sure everyone who needs an ID has one. All county election offices will make free photo IDs for local voters during regular business hours. The Wake County Board of Elections decided to open its office for outside of normal hours to help people who don’t have time to come by during a weekday.

Lawsuits not done yet

Although Republicans have now won the main state-level lawsuit against voter ID, there’s still a federal lawsuit moving forward, filed by the NAACP and other civil rights groups. And more could be filed if problems arise now that voter ID is actually being used.

Irving Joyner, a professor at North Carolina Central University’s law school and longtime NAACP attorney, said they’re hoping to see things move faster in their federal lawsuit now that the 2024 elections are imminent. The two sides are currently fighting over what evidence should be allowed at trial, but court records indicate that a ruling should be made soon.

Once that’s settled, the next fight could be over when to hold the trial — a consequential decision. If the NAACP wins and voter ID is ruled unconstitutional yet again, it would matter a great deal whether that ruling comes before or after next November’s presidential election.

“We have sought to provide the judge with a schedule that will get us into trial in the early part of 2024 to give the judge plenty of time to consider the evidence that we are presenting,” Joyner said. “… But you never know. The state is trying to string it along, out until after the 2024 election.”

The money spent on the numerous voter ID lawsuits over the years, by activist groups and North Carolina taxpayers alike, is well into the millions of dollars.

It may seem a large sum for an issue that affects only a small number of people without IDs. But elections in this swing state can come down to the slimmest of margins. So even changes that affect only a small number of potential voters could still have big consequences.

The 2016 governor’s race was decided by just 0.2% of the vote. The 2020 election for Supreme Court Chief Justice was even closer, with the two candidates separated by just 400 votes out of more than 5.4 million total ballots cast.

How we got here, and what’s next

The push for voter ID in North Carolina started in Washington, D.C., in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Shelby County v. Holder ruling in June 2013 stripped away the federal government’s power to preemptively stop election laws being proposed in states, including North Carolina, that have long histories of racist voter suppression.

Just one month later, North Carolina’s Republican-led state legislature passed a massive package of new election laws that included a voter ID requirement, as well as cuts to early voting. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed it into law, calling the new rules “common sense reforms.”

But a lawsuit by civil rights groups uncovered evidence that GOP lawmakers had a racial breakdown of data such as which types of IDs people had, or when they voted.

The legislature used that data to write the law so that it cut the days of early voting Black voters used most — and, for voter ID, to allow the types of IDs that white people were more likely to have but to disallow the types of IDs that Black people were more likely to have.

Legislative leaders admitted doing so in their court filings. But they argued that their racial targeting should be allowed. They said they wanted to disenfranchise Black voters not for racist reasons, but to give the GOP a political edge, since Black people vote disproportionately for Democrats.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit was not swayed by that argument, calling the legislature’s actions “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times” of racism guiding a state’s election laws. It struck down the law as unconstitutional.

That ruling came down in 2016. Almost immediately GOP state lawmakers began working on a new voter ID law, which they said was more lenient and should be able to pass legal muster. Voters gave them the green light in 2018 by approving the voter ID constitutional amendment, and the new law passed — that time even winning the support of a small number of Black Democrats in the legislature.

Fast forward to 2023, and not only is voter ID in use but Republican lawmakers are forging ahead with yet more changes to election law. One proposal, Senate Bill 747, would grant more rights to partisan poll observers and would also make it harder for people to vote by mail. Just like with voter ID, conservatives say it’s needed to improve election integrity and liberals say the real goal is to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it Thursday.

“This legislation has nothing to do with election security and everything to do with Republicans keeping and gaining power,” he wrote in announcing his veto. “It requires valid votes to be tossed out unnecessarily, schemes to restrict early voting and absentee ballots, encourages voter intimidation and attempts to give Republican legislators the authority to decide contested election results.”

Republicans, however, have enough votes to override his veto and pass the bill into law anyway. They’re likely to do just that, and Newtown — the lead Senate elections official — slammed Cooper for his rhetoric on that bill, voter ID and other election-related fights between their two parties in the leadup to 2024.

“At a time when Gov. Cooper and other Democrats are sowing distrust in our elections process, I believe finally implementing photo voter ID requirements will help boost voter confidence,” Newton told WRAL.

One thing is certain: If SB 747 becomes law, it’s likely to face legal challenges just like the ones that held up voter ID for years. Joyner said the NAACP and others are already planning on how to respond once the legislature overrides Cooper’s veto.