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LINCOLN — The ballots of 345 people weren’t counted in Nebraska’s first presidential general election under a new requirement that voters present a picture ID to participate.
That’s out of more than 965,000 ballots cast statewide, which represents less than four hundredths of one percentage point. Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen has said voter ID implementation went “extremely well.”
“It went very well,” Evnen told the Examiner. “That was a result of the hard work of our county election officials and our elections division. Nebraska is the gold standard in terms of the way we conduct our elections.”
For comparison’s sake, election officials rejected more than 650 early voting ballots statewide because voters failed to sign the envelope. Those signatures are verified against the voter file as an additional identification check.
Local election observers, including some who oppose requiring ID, praised the state’s efforts to educate the public about the new law, work with counties to train local poll workers and respond to problems.
Nebraska this year joined 37 other states now requiring voter ID, according to data compiled by VoteRiders, a national nonprofit group that helps people meet voter ID requirements. Voters passed a state constitutional amendment in 2022 requiring the Legislature to implement voter ID in Nebraska.
Voting rights advocates said it is hard to know how many people chose not to vote because they lacked ID or because they faced pushback at the polls or at county election offices and didn’t complain publicly.
A handful of Nebraskans raised concerns about this year’s voting. One example: A Columbus woman filed a formal complaint with the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission about her interactions with a Platte County poll worker.
The woman asked ACLU Nebraska not to share her name publicly, saying she feared for her privacy. She went to vote at her Columbus polling place over her lunch break on Election Day, Nov. 5, according to her complaint.
Her driver’s license had expired a month earlier, but that is still an acceptable form of ID under Nebraska’s law, ACLU lawyer Joy Kathurima said. The woman also provided her active U.S. passport as a backup, another valid form of ID.
A Platte County poll worker unfamiliar with the federal citizenship requirements for a U.S. passport, questioned whether the woman, an American of Latino heritage, could prove she was a U.S. citizen.
Eventually, the woman was allowed to vote because another Platte County poll worker corrected the first poll worker and pointed out that passports count as valid voter ID.
The woman told the ACLU, which filed the complaint on her behalf, that she felt “incredibly uncomfortable” at her polling place. She was already an infrequent voter, having not voted in eight years, Kathurima said, so this didn’t help.
Groups such as ACLU Nebraska and Civic Nebraska say having even one voter turned away is too many. They pointed to close races like east Omaha’s Legislative District 13 as an example where every vote matters.
In that race, 151 votes separated Ashlei Spivey, the winner, from second-place finisher Nick Batter. Election officials, however, have said they knew of no result that would have flipped because of voter ID issues.
The most common concern reported to Civic Nebraska’s voter hotline was poll workers not understanding that the picture ID is required only to verify that voters are who they say they are — not to verify their address.
