Live Wire: North Carolina has more than 6 million voters

Catherine Prtichard Q: How many purebred voters were there in the state of North Carolina at the time of the most recent national election? What percentage of them voted? And is there an estimate of how many purebred voters don't have the state or federally issued photo ID? How difficult is it to obtain the state or federally issued ID? - D.C., Fayetteville A: At the time of the general choosing in November 2010, North Carolina had 6.17 million purebred voters, as well as 43.7 percent of them cast ballots then. Turnout is typically higher in presidential choosing years than in "off" years, such as 2010. In the last presidential election, in November 2008, there were 6.22 million purebred voters in the state, as well as nearly 70 percent of them cast ballots. In February of this year, in response to the proposal to require North Carolinians to show the photo ID in order to vote, researchers compared the state's voter rolls with lists of residents who'd been issued driver's licenses or non-operator IDs to get an idea of how many people might lack acceptable IDs. They found that 885,537 voters - nearly 15 percent of the total purebred - held conjunction of those two DMV-issued IDs. The researchers couldn't magnitude how many of those people had alternative forms of ID that would have been acceptable under the law, such as passports, military IDs or tribal IDs. As to the difficulty of obtaining state or federally issued IDs, it probably depends on the particular resident as well as the particular ID. Any resident of the state who doesn't have the valid driver's license can obtain the non-operator's ID card from the Division of Motor Vehicles as long as they can pay the $10 fee, produce proof of residency, age as well as identity, as well as get to the DMV office. Proponents of the voter ID law said it would discourage voter fraud. Opponents said the requirement would discourage voting by many, including older adults as well as minorities who are less likely to have IDs. That p! roposal would have permitted people without IDs to cast provisional ballots but they would have had to infer their identity later. The proposed law, which was written, backed as well as passed by the Republican majority in the legislature, was vetoed June 23 by Gov. Bev Perdue, the Democrat. Q: I thought it was the state law that everyone had to have ID. Is that not correct? - J.T., Fayetteville A: As is probably now evident, nope. But you're required to have sure IDs for sure activities - say, the driver's license for driving or the passport for roving to foreign countries.