By Christopher Cooper
The "Election Integrity Act," SB 326 was filed in the NC Senate on March 18, 2021 by Senators Daniel,
Newton, and Hise. The bill has a number of provisions, including (1)
"prohibit[ing] the state board of elections and county boards of
elections from accepting private monetary donations for certain
purposes," (2) "appropriat[ing] funds to establish a program to identity
and assist voters needing photo identification", (3) "amend[ing] the
date by which a voter must request an absentee ballot, and (4) amending
the date by which a "mail-in absentee ballot must be received."
While
the first two provisions are important and worthy of study, the third
and fourth policy changes are ready-made for the type of empirical
analysis that we try to provide on this blog. In this brief entry, I
report results from a simple simulation of whose votes would not have been counted and who's would have been rejected in
the past two General Elections if SB 326 had been the law.
