During a federal trial in North Carolina over whether a new voter registration law discriminates against college students, a prominent rightwing election integrity activist previewed Republicans’ long-range plans to end same-day registration.
Judge Thomas Schroeder is deliberating over the future of provisions in Senate bill 747, which increased registration requirements for voters who cast ballots on the same day they register to vote during North Carolina’s early voting period. Schroeder called for briefs at the end of November after a week-long trial in Winston-Salem.
Cleta Mitchell, an ally of Donald Trump in his bid to overturn the 2020 election and the founder of the Election Integrity Network, offered testimony in depositions and hearings in the case, but only after losing a legally strenuous fight to avoid participating in the case.
Same-day registration “make[s] it easy [to cheat] when you have the polling locations where [students] live on the campus; you have same-day registration; you can use student IDs”, she said in court, as revealed in the brief that plaintiff Democracy North Carolina filed in November. “You create a continuum where you’re just breaking little bones all along the arm. Pretty soon you’ve got a broken arm.”
The new North Carolina law allows a ballot to be discounted if a single registration letter sent to a voter’s address is returned as undeliverable, and requires a same-day registrant to prove they live where they are registered with documents like an electricity bill – something other registrants are not required to do.
“In her deposition, she testified that she did not ‘believe there is sufficient effort to confirm residency of college students,’ whereas at trial she accepted that college students who are North Carolina residents should be allowed to register and vote,” the plaintiff’s brief states about Mitchell. “She testified at deposition that ‘it is the Democratic party’s strategy to support same-day registration and polling places on campuses’ ‘so college students can just roll out of bed, vote, and get back into bed,’ because she thinks that ‘students are going to vote 95 percent [for] one party.’”
Democracy North Carolina argued in court that legislators in the state relied on the suggestions of both Mitchell and Jim Womack, president and founder of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, when drafting the law, and that the activists intended to discriminate against younger voters’ access to the ballot as a policy goal.
“We were a hostile witness to both sides,” said Womack, referring to himself and Mitchell. “Their case centers around the work that Cleta and I did to try to convince the legislature of North Carolina in 2023 to can same day registration, get rid of it permanently,. We’re the only southern state that does it. It cannot be done without creating a special class of voters. And it accommodates election fraud.”
Both Womack and Mitchell head groups aligned with Republican organizations that challenge voter registrations and work to reform state election laws. During the trial, plaintiffs showed how the pair had met with state lawmakers and proposed language for the bill. At trial, Womack sounded dismissive of college voters, testifying that their “attention span is focused on other things until just before the election, when, all of a sudden, they’re motivated to get registered right in this moment”, particularly by “their beer-drinking buddies or college student friends”.
State leaders defending the suit argued in a brief that there was “no evidence that legislators adopted any recommendation because of Ms Mitchell” and that the plaintiffs who could not find evidence that the lawmakers intended to discriminate against young voters were relying on “guilt-by-association”.
If state leaders had taken their recommendations to heart, they would have eliminated same-day registration entirely, Womack said after the trial. Mitchell testified that she strongly believed that same-day registration should be banned.
Chris Shenton, senior counsel for voting rights for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, who represented the plaintiffs on the case, said conservative legislators deferred to the activists’ assertions about the possibility of voting fraud without actually doing their homework to see whether it was happening.
“They did no study of what the provision would do,” Shenton said. “They requested no data on what its likely impact would be. And they viewed it as a common sense change that was in the law at the request of the constituent groups like the Election Integrity Network and the North Carolina Election Integrity Team.”
About half the people who vote using same-day registration in North Carolina are college students, Shenton said. One of Democracy North Carolina’s arguments is that targeting college students violates the age discrimination provision of the 26th amendment.
In 2024, about 5.7 million North Carolinians voted in the presidential election. Trump won the state by about 183,000 votes. The provision of SB 747 at issue might be expected to affect a few thousand votes, at most.
About 4,000 voters who used same-day registration in North Carolina last year did not provide partial social security information or a driver’s license number, Womack said.
