North Carolina

Some of the most significant and contested changes have come in North Carolina.

Unlike in 2020, voters there will have to show a photo ID this fall. State lawmakers passed the voter ID law in 2018, but courts blocked it from going into effect. More than a year after the presidential election, the state Supreme Court struck it down. Months later, after Republicans took control of the court, the justices reinstated the voter ID law.

The state’s ID law is the strictest in the country when it comes to mail voting, according to the Voting Rights Lab. When voters return their mail ballots, they must include a copy of their ID along with the signature of a notary or the signatures of two witnesses.

Previously, mail ballots postmarked by Election Day were counted if they arrived up to three days later. Now, mail ballots must by received by Election Day. In last month’s presidential primary, more than 750 ballots were rejected that would have been counted under the old law.

Another recent change would make the state elections board and county elections boards evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, rather than giving an edge to whichever party controls the governor’s office. A court has blocked that law, finding that it interferes with the powers of Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, so they have kept their Democratic majorities. The Republican-controlled state Supreme Court could take up the case before the election.

A change to the makeup of the boards could be significant. The boards determine how many early-voting locations there are, and deadlocks could result in counties, including the state’s most populous and Democratic ones, getting just one earlyvoting site each.

New laws in North Carolina also give partisan poll observers more authority at polling places and make it easier to challenge ballots cast by mail and at early-voting locations. The ability to challenge ballots echoes a law in Georgia that has been used to question thousands of voters’ eligibility to cast ballots.

Election experts said such policies put a strain on election workers, forcing them to review challenges that are often based on hunches or faulty data. Often meritless, the challenges rarely result in preventing people from voting but could make some people less likely to vote, they said.

“It can be sending an intimidating message to voters,” Morales-Doyle said.