The voter ID boogeyman

It all started over a decade ago. The year was 2013, and North Carolina inaugurated its first Republican governor in decades. He would work alongside a majority-Republican state legislature, the first double Republican leadership in over a century, after nearly 150 years of domination by Democrats.

Soon thereafter, reports started to emerge, murmurs that within the new Republican mandate existed a dreadful monster; one with the power to destroy Democracy itself. They were just rumors at first, but then something tangible came to light: real documentation that caused a collective scream from everyone not “on the wrong side of history” — voter ID legislation.

The beast made its way from the legislature, to the desk of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, where it received a signature before being let loose upon the electorate of North Carolina. It was general pandemonium in those days, for such an insidious threat had rarely threatened the state in such a way. Democrats had deduced that the demon targeted minorities and the poor with “almost surgical precision.”

Something had to be done, and not a moment too soon. So, dragon slayers, like legendary social justice warrior Rev. William Barber, were summoned to take down the monster. In fact, the very day it was released into North Carolina as law, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) lent legal armies to local North Carolina Democrats in hopes of disarming and tying up the boogeyman with lawsuit filings.

It was a fierce battle requiring weekly replenishments of leftist misfits called into service by Democrats, the guards of Democracy.

It worked! The litigious campaign against the voter ID monster, referred to colloquially as the “Sue til Blue” brigade, or later “The Resistance,” successfully quelled the beast with a carefully placed lawsuit. Then in 2016, after years of nervous persistence, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit blocked the horrific law from going into effect. The 2016 elections in North Carolina were safe! For a time…

Just a couple years later, in 2018, Republicans in the state legislature dared to give the people the keys to the beast’s cage. In an inexplicably reckless move, the Republican General Assembly filed and passed legislation giving the power to decide the fate of the voter ID boogeyman to North Carolina voters, by adding it to the ballot later that year.

That fall, Democrat activists’ greatest fears came true as the voters of North Carolina, obviously blind to the dangers of the wicked vote-suppressor, overwhelmingly approved the release of the monster. It was as if the countless Monday evenings of mob action hadn’t counted for anything. Approved by the people, Republican lawmakers crafted a new, expansive vehicle for voter ID, and gave the people every conceivable weapon to defend against its rumored power of suppression.

This time, Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper, an experienced partisan litigator, was at first able to veto the legislation. Only a brief respite was won, though, as Republicans, still on the wrong side of history, swiftly overrode Cooper’s veto and set the boogeyman loose on North Carolina. If it wasn’t for a renewed crusade of social justice warriors furiously filing a salvo of new lawsuits to again tie up the voter ID colossus, there’s no telling how many votes would have been surgically suppressed.

With the immediate crisis quelled, Democrats and their activist allies turned their attention to making sure the beast could never rise again. They developed new decoy tactics to sneak past the boogeyman-sympathizers (voters) and take control of the NC Supreme Court with their own social justice warriors. Once in control, they hammered a big nail into the boogeyman’s coffin and declared victory, at last!

But just as the issue seemed dead and buried, an unmistakable twitch alluded to a monstrous return. Voters across the state, admittedly safe from the scourge of voter ID, naively rejected their own safety by resoundingly rejecting Democrat judges and electing a conservative majority to the NC Supreme Court. The unthinkable then came to pass: the voter ID boogeyman was resurrected, given sanction, and released again. It’s first contact? Massive 2023 municipal elections in huge population centers like Mecklenburg County, where Democrats warned that heaps of vulnerable populations were defenseless against the disenfranchisement wielded by voter ID.

They never saw it coming. In the aftermath of the 2023 municipal elections, the first real run in with the voter ID bogeyman after years of crippling fear, leftist poll watchers, reporters, and politicos could not believe their own eyes. What they saw was something they’d never imagined.

When they went to survey the damage, the carnage, the suppression; they saw…NOTHING.

That’s because the voter ID boogeyman isn’t real. It never was. Last fall, voter ID requirements were in place for dozens of municipal elections across the state. By all credible accounts, there was nothing out of order. Nothing out of place. No disenfranchisement, no voter suppression. In fact, many county election directors asserted they had no reports of anyone coming to the polls without an ID. It turns out that almost everyone has an ID, and those that don’t are easily afforded one by Republicans’ expansive legislation, or they can merely cast a provisional ballot to be verified later.

Right now, in the thick of early voting for 2024 primaries, with voter photo ID required, things are progressing without issue.

Actually, had North Carolinians been released earlier from the grips of Democrats’ fear-mongering narratives, they’d have realized long ago that dozens of states (even blue states) require some form of voter ID. More enlightening still, is that evidence suggests voter ID laws don’t suppress anyone’s vote. No significant change in voter turnout occurs, even among those whom Democrats’ insisted were incapable of defending against a voter ID requirement.

Another state subject to the left’s scare tactics on voter ID, Georgia, faced a very high profile test as recently as 2022. The result? Turnout was very high. Higher than expected. High enough to almost undercut the boogeyman narrative the left has committed itself to in regards to voter ID. Almost. An Associated Press headline following that election hints at the powerful commitment to make-believe: “Effect of Georgia’s voting law unclear, despite high turnout.”

North Carolina will follow the same reality-based path this presidential election year. Despite a decade of delusional premonitions of the voter ID boogeyman suppressing voters, voters of all kinds will now be required to show photo identification, and voters of all kinds will easily meet this requirement.

Then, once the election comes and goes without a catastrophic blow dealt to “Democracy itself,” voters can sleep at night, totally unafraid of the voter ID boogeyman.