North Carolina for the not-win

All right, North Carolina. That’s enough changing your laws all over the place already.

Sure, your big in-person voter photo ID law doesn’t happen until 2016. But you seem to have forgotten to mention that you’ve recently changed some other important stuff.

First, you finally made an official state form for absentee ballot requests. That’s kind of nice, since, prior to that, you required voters to actually type or handwrite a request themselves, making it hard for us to make sure people put the proper information on their requests, since you actually forbade us creating a ready-made application.

But now you will only accept the official form? You might want to, you know, make a little  effort to make sure people know that. I mean seriously, your site doesn’t even mention how things used to be or that you recently changed the entire way voters have to request their absentee ballot.

Then you go ahead and eliminate voter registration from One Stop Absentee Voting, and, again, kinda pretend it just never existed. Do you want voters to feel like they’re crazy? (‘Say, I could swear we used to be able to register to vote and vote all at once during the early voting period.’ 'Nope. You’re wrong. Explanation: unnecessary.’) Plus, without voter registration, calling it “One Stop” seems a little, I don’t know, not true?

OK, OK, I know. I’m being a little bit hard on you and singling you out. Do you deserve it? Absolutely. Are you the worst offenders when it comes to needless complexity and lack of transparency in voting? Arguably, yes. But are only ones making trouble? No. And I know that. I’m just sayin’, no more surprises for a while, OK? We good?