Thomas Shanahan: Free Sheri Everts!

ASU Chancellor Sheri Everts

News leaking out of Raleigh suggests that the issue of certifying university IDs for the purposes of voting is as FUBAR as anything has ever been under the ministrations of the Republican overlords in the General Assembly.

Because some of the universities (a numerical minority, as we understand it) in the 16-member UNC System can't meet the requirements of the "attestation" form -- principally in the matter of allowing "selfies" for the photo -- UNC General Counsel Thomas Shanahan is forcing all the universities to refrain from signing, which will inevitably disadvantage and potentially disenfranchise thousands of students who otherwise would qualify for using their student IDs.

Appalachian State University is one of those universities that meet the requirements of the attestation form, but Chancellor Sheri Everts is clinging to the Thomas Shanahan "company line" and refusing to sign. She's received hefty raises from the conservative corps running the Board of Governors, and she's not likely to step out of line in support of her own students' constitutional rights. Instead, she promises to help students get a free ID, we assume by giving them the address and open hours of the DMV or the local Board of Elections.

Shanahan seemingly wants changes made to the attestation form, which would require changes to the law itself, which the Berger/Moore overlords are not going to do. So it's very likely at the moment that every student at every UNC-affiliated institution is about to be disenfrancised from using their student IDs to vote. Most severely impacted will be the students with out-of-state drivers licenses and students with no drivers licenses at all.

Shanahan could free up Chancellor Everts to sign the attestation form for AppState. Why won't he? Or she could simply refuse to toe the company line. Why won’t she? Perhaps because if some of The Sixteen sign the attestation, it will establish the tilted ground of uneven treatment under the law, which will provoke more lawsuits.

'Course, not allowing any of The Sixteen to sign is going to play into an existing lawsuit that's already challenging the constitutionality of the entire photo ID law.

Memo to Thomas Shanahan: Putting the constitutional rights of thousands of UNC-system students in jeopardy will not save the university system from itself.

What Kim Strach Said to UNC's Thomas Shanahan on Thursday

SBOE Exec. Dir. Kim Strach

Early last week, UNC System General Counsel Thomas Shanahan -- having taken heat over his negative interpretation of his 16 universities' ability to sign an "attestation" form about using student IDs for voting, finally asked for an interpretation of the law from the NC State Board of Elections (SBOE). An interpretation by the SBOE stands as the final authority. It can only be challenged in the courts or through a re-write of the law.

Reproduced below is the three-page letter from State Board of Elections (SBOE) Executive Director Kim Strach answering Shanahan's interpretation of the attestation form. He's just wrong on all points save one. Namely:

1. Shanahan has asked: Are methods used to collect vital information from university employees (non-students) sufficient for issuing IDs? By Federal statute, info includes citizenship, date of birth, and Social Security numbers. Answer yes.

2. Are universities obliged to ask their students to verify -- prove -- their date of birth, citizenship status, and Social Security number in order to qualify for a photo ID? No. You're confusing voter registration with photo ID. Director Strach's exact words: "We do not view the statute to require the college or university to substitute its judgement for that of the elections administration apparatus whose role it is to monitor the voter rolls across the State."

3. Shanahan: What if not all students provide a SSN, date of birth, or citizenship status during the enrollment process? Don't chancellors have to sign “Under penalty of perjury"?  Can we re-write that "under penalty of perjury" part? Answer: No. There just has to be a process by which evidence of identity is requested. If you're satisfied with a student's identity sufficient to enroll him, you're good for issuing an official photo ID.

4. Are "selfies" submitted by the students sufficient for use on a photo ID card? No. Photographs must be taken by the institution or its contractors. (This ruling will affect half a dozen high enrollment institutions (including NC Central, UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Greensboro, Pembroke, UNC-Wilmington, and Western Carolina), which will need to change their procedures.)

5. Can an institution issue a separate and special photo ID for voting purposes if it wants to? Answer: Sure.

Burning Questions for Thomas Shanahan:

1. Will you share -- have you already shared -- this letter with the 16 chancellors? Because in the specific instance of Appalachian State University, Chancellor Everts' spokeswoman was still spouting two days ago what appear to be official negative talking points about student photo ids -- talking points that are now proven totally wrong for ASU students by SBOE's official ruling.

2. Did those negative talking points used by Chancellor Everts (and other chancellors?) come directly from Shanahan? ("There's just so many stumbling blocks to certifying student IDs for voting, and wouldn't it be okay just to send them down to the Board of Elections at the courthouse to have their photo taken and their voting ID made?") Kim Strach's letter clears those stumbling blocks (except for the issue of "selfies," which is just sensible).

3. Are you prepared to accept the reality that all 16 universities can't be uniform in their practices, and that that's okay? Only on the issue of "selfies" is there no flexibility for method and practice.

The Kim Strach letter dated last Thursday:

Where Was Thomas Shanahan Last November?

I've been waiting for Thomas Shanahan, General Counsel for the UNC System, to hold a promised press conference and explain himself about disallowing all university system student IDs for the purposes of voting, and I missed entirely that Shanahan issued a statement on Monday (reproduced below). Evidence of it showed up in Travis Fain's reporting for WRAL, and the statement itself has been found.

It contains evidence that Mr. Shanahan does not understand the difference between registering to vote and showing up to vote with photo ID.

He warns in the statement that the UNC System can't ensure the validity of their student IDs to be used as proof of identity at the polls because some of those student IDs are issued to those under 18 years old, to some non-citizens, and to those who don't have a Social Security number. He fails to mention (or understand?) that the student ID can be used as proof of identity for registered voters only. Those who are younger than 18, or who don't have SSNs, and/or who are not citizens cannot register to vote in the first place. Trying to go in and vote with a student ID if you're not already qualified and registered will get you nowhere. Why wouldn't Shanahan understand that?

Plus this: In the public hearing held on the law in the Elections Oversight Committee on November 26 last year, neither Shanahan nor any representative from the UNC System attended to voice any concerns about the language of the law. Reps from the Community College system and reps from NC Independent Colleges and Universities were there and had objections and suggestions to protect their students and ensure their rights to vote using college-issued photo IDs. The UNC System was not there, at least so far as we can tell.

Yet months later the UNC System top lawyer precipitates a major crisis about voting rights for college students. Where was he last November?

New Developments in the UNC System Student ID Crisis

Rep. Russell

NC House members Ray Russell (Dist. 93) and Zack Hawkins (Dist. 31) have introduced a bill to extend the deadline for colleges to certify the process of producing acceptable student IDs, from March 15 to September 15 (House Bill 167). The duo (perhaps with others in the House) are scheduled to hold a press conference today, and we hear that Republican Rep. David Lewis, the powerful Rules Committee Chair and the king of the gerrymander, is supporting the bill. That's significant, if true.

If there's bipartisan support in the NC House for fixing the crisis in allowing university student IDs for purposes of voting, then maybe there's hope. But what about Phil Berger and the Republican Senate?

Meanwhile, Thomas Shanahan, the top lawyer for the UNC Board of Governors and the man who pretty much precipitated this crisis, has remained silent though he had supposedly promised a press conference early this week to declare why student IDs weren't acceptable. If he were very smart, about now he might want to say something like this :

"I'm so glad that legislators in the North Carolina House have introduced a bill to give our universities time to iron out any difficulties in certifying the process by which students are given photo IDs. We have solid expectations that the bill will pass both houses of the General Assembly, which would be the best thing for protecting the voting rights of all our citizens, especially with the March 15 deadline fast approaching, a deadline that could disenfranchise so many of our students."

UPDATE
The press conference will be today at 1 pm in the Legislative Building press conference room. You can listen to the press conference at by clicking on the link: https://www.ncleg.gov/.
Click on audio, then press conference room.

Group Petitioning ASU Chancellor to Sign "Attestation" Form

The Watauga Voting Rights Task Force (VRTF), the group that successfully sued in 2014 and again in 2016 to return early voting to the AppState Student Union, has mounted a petition to AppState Chancellor Sheri Everts, urging her to sign the Board of Elections "attestation" form which would certify student photo IDs as appropriate for the purposes of voting.

Taking her cues from the UNC Board of Governors (and specifically from UNC General Counsel Thomas C. Shanahan), Everts has been dragging her feet about the form and signaling that she has no intention of signing it. She got "cover" from Shanahan last Friday when he told a group from the Faculty Assembly that in his opinion no UNC constituent institution could sign the form.

The lawyers for the Voting Rights Task Force, among others, think that Shanahan is just wrong, that he has decided to apply a blanket disability because of some problems at a handful of colleges over official student photos. Those problems do not exist at AppState. Nor at a majority of the institutions including UNC-Chapel Hill.

Student Government at AppState is also getting active in this fight, which appears far from over as the March 15th deadline date looms closer.

Tom Shanahan, The Man at the Top of Disallowing UNC System Student IDs for Voting

In our attempt to discover what specific concerns AppState Chancellor Sheri Everts has with the "attestation form" discussed extensively down-column, we have been told multiple times by ASU's Chief Communications Officer that Chancellor Everts has never received the form. (For a university leader who has never received the form, she's not been shy in raising specific objections to various parts of the language in the form.)

What Everts' spokeswoman means, apparently, is that the form has never been officially delivered from the man who has been holding onto it, Thomas C. Shanahan, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the UNC System. Has Shanahan failed to provide a copy of the attestation form to all the chancellors of the constituent universities? If not, how can those same chancellors assert the supposed ways in which their universities cannot comply with the form when/if they have not yet received it? And why haven't the chancellors simply asked for a copy? (We were able to get it in short order from the State Board of Elections and reproduce it once again below.)

Shanahan received the form from its authors at the State Board of Elections with a commitment it would be distributed to all the universities. Instead, Shanahan has kept it to himself (though clearly everyone on this green earth has seen it by now). He has then clearly issued talking points and orders to chancellors, generic talking points that obviously don't apply to all institutions.

(Note: When the voter photo enabling law was being discussed in the General Assembly, according to Gerry Cohen who was often in the room, he heard "representations" that "student IDs would comply" with the new requirement. Who made those representations? Someone from Tom Shanahan's office? Inquiring minds want to know.)

You have to ask yourself, "Why would Shanahan hold onto the form?" That question was partially answered on Friday when Shanahan told a gathering of UNC faculty that none of the constituent universities could meet the requirements. None? Shanahan emphasized the few institutions that allow students to submit "selfies" for the photo on their IDs, but that's not nearly all including AppState (which takes official ID photos at a secure location).

We hear that Shanahan is planning a press conference this week to announce his decision that no UNC System photo ID will work for voting. He's laying down his interpretation of the law in an authoritative way, backed by a conservative-majority Board of Governors who have their own authoritative issues and who have displayed open hostility to student rights including the right to vote and who apparently have no problem setting up the 16 chancellors as collateral damage.

People need to be at that press conference. We'll let you know when we see it announced.

New Crisis for NC College Students -- Your Student ID May Not Count for Voting

This is news. Big honking news. Not because the top lawyer for the UNC System says university IDs can't comply with the state’s new photo ID law, but because he's wrong. At least he's wrong for Appalachian State University.

As part of its new Voter ID Bill, the state legislature determined that university IDs would qualify as valid proof of identity at the polls as long as the universities complied with certain criteria (Senate Bill 824). The State Board of Elections created both rules and a form for certifying compliance with this criteria. The "attestation form" must be signed by university officials no later than March 15th to qualify a university’s student IDs as valid proof of identity. If the attestation form is not signed by March 15th, that university’s student IDs will not count as valid proof of identity for elections through 2020.

Here’s a link to the rules: https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.gov/Rulemaking/PublicNotice8Feb2019.pdf. Form is copied below.

When student activists and others began their approach to ensure that Chancellor Everts would meet the deadline for signing the attestation form, they heard varied reasons why the form could not be signed. Everts cited -- or those close to her have cited -- a problem with the citizenship declaration, a problem of no present expiration date on the ID, a problem with photos, a problem with the collection of SSNs. Those "problems” have all been debunked consistently by lawyers (other than the lawyers who work at the UNC System) as a (willful?) misreading of the form.

Turns out the universities have now banded together under the interpretations offered by Thomas C. Shanahan, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the UNC system, to refuse to sign the attestation, regardless of whether an individual university can comply or not. If none comply, then individual university leadership is insulated. If one or more do comply, the others are exposed for harsh criticism.

The heat has turned up anyway on Chancellor Everts. So much so that on Friday she sent out a statement university-wide asserting her commitment to student voting rights, and while the email reads more like a precursor statement for refusing to sign the form, she also asked for additional input from all interested parties. It's good she asked.

In an attempt to get control of the narrative, on Friday, February 22, Mr. Shanahan weighed in on the “attestation crisis.” Shanahan told a meeting of professors in Chapel Hill that while the system seeks to promote UNC students’ ability to vote, none of the 16 campuses currently meets requirements that the law demands of universities for student identification cards to count as valid voting identification.

Let me repeat that: According to Mr. Shanahan yesterday, none of the 16 campuses currently meets requirements for voter photo ID.

After the law was passed (one wonders, why not before?), Shanahan explained, the UNC system office consulted with campuses across the UNC system (most of that consultation was likely lawyer-to-lawyer). He stated that the requirements that must be met for attestation were steep. And chancellors, he repeatedly emphasized, must, according to the law, make this attestation under penalty of perjury. (More on those requirements in subsequent posts, but I will note here that lying on any such legal document would be under penalty of perjury. So what?)

After saying he has consulted with the 16 campuses, Shanahan concluded that “no institution meets the requirements” under the voter ID law. For Shanahan, the question is whether campuses are actually already doing the things the law expects them to do. As he put it, “Do [campuses] have these procedures so they can say substantively, ‘Yes, we are doing this’?”

As that question pertains to ASU, the answer is “yes."

For other universities, there may indeed be a problem. Some institutions allow students to select their own ID pictures — a “selfie” — for their student ID cards. This is true, for example, at UNC Charlotte. Yet the Voter ID law requires chancellors to attest that their identification cards “contain photographs of students taken by the university or college or its agents or contractors.” 

Shanahan said that the law is subject to multiple interpretations (duh). And there's the crack in the door, for we know that other authoritative legal interpretations don't see the form the same way. Shanahan claimed that the State Board of Elections (SBOE) has not been forthcoming in providing guidelines. “Ultimately what we need is the actual interpretation of the SBOE that will be binding,” Shanahan said. If he gets that, then the legal assumptions above go away. We are hopeful the SBOE will give Shanahan the assurance he needs. And quickly.

Shanahan emphasized that the UNC system strongly supported encouraging students’ civic participation and said that chancellors are not trying to add a hurdle to the voting process. But saying warm things about student voting and how you believe in the highest of civic virtues, and then refusing to find a way to uphold student voting rights just doesn’t get it.

The UNC System Office, based in Chapel Hill, manages the 17-institution system (16 universities and one high school). It is run by the UNC system president, William Roper, and reports to the UNC Board of Governors, which is appointed by the legislature.