Aaron Sanderford
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.
2024 Nebraska voter ID general election, by the numbers
In-person voting
272: provisional ballots cast in person at polling sites without ID
211: rejected for lack of ID provided at county election office by deadline after election
61: in-person ballots corrected or cured
Voting by mail in all-mail counties
107: ballots returned without ID number on envelope or photocopy of ID or impediment form
Reasonable impediments
76: forms filed seeking exception for reasonable impediment
27: rejected for lack of meeting allowed exceptions
Total rejected
345: total number of ballots rejected
Some raised concerns
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 safety. 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.
“To have that type of experience obviously makes it even harder for someone to be able to want to vote in the future,” Kathurima said.
The Platte County Election Commission did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. State election officials acknowledged a handful of incidents in which poll workers misunderstood the requirements.
No results changed, officials say
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.
Some poll workers told voters erroneously that the addresses on their driver’s license or state ID needed to match the voter rolls, which is not required, said Heidi Uhing, Civic’s director of public policy.
“You are who you are regardless of where you’re located,” Uhing said. “The benefit of that part of the law is that people move around a lot, and not everyone is speedy about getting their documentation updated.”
The most ballots cast without IDs occurred in Douglas County. There, 146 people who didn’t have ID or lacked a valid ID voted provisionally. Of those 146, 48 were able to fix the problem, officials said. Twenty-three of them visited the election office later and showed acceptable ID, and 25 verified a reasonable impediment.
That means 98 others turned in provisional ballots but did not have their votes counted, including some who filed for impediments but did not meet the standard and did not return verification calls from election officials, Douglas County Election Commissioner Brian Kruse said.
Kruse mentioned a would-be voter who had moved to the Omaha area from Chicago but couldn’t get Cook County, Illinois, to send her a copy of her birth certificate in time to get a Nebraska-approved ID.
How voter ID works in Nebraska
Voting in person
Nebraska requires in-person voters to take a state-approved photo ID, which could include a driver’s license, a college ID, a nursing home ID, a passport, a military ID, a tribal ID or an ID from a city, county, school district or another political subdivision.
People who forget to take their photo ID but want to cast their ballot can still choose to vote provisionally. However, they will need to take a photo ID to their county election office within a week of Election Day.
People who lack a photo ID can have their ballots counted if they apply for a certificate from their county election office verifying an accepted disability, circumstance or religious objection.
Voting by mail
Voters requesting a ballot to vote early by mail must also verify their ID. They can do so by writing down their ID number from a Nebraska driver’s license or state ID card.
Those unwilling or unable to provide one of those ID numbers on the request form can instead enclose a photocopy of a state-approved photo ID, which could be a passport, military ID or Nebraska college ID, among others. People with disabilities, a major illness or religious objections to being photographed can fill out an exception form.
His office saw some voters who moved from Iowa and didn’t know that the Nebraska law only recognizes driver’s licenses from the Cornhusker State. He also heard some confusion about how to verify IDs from nursing homes.
“Honestly it went very, very smooth,” Kruse said. “I was a little worried since this was our first big election. … I guess the good news is honestly it didn’t affect turnout, which was among the biggest we’ve had.”
Turnout high
Statewide turnout was the second-highest in votes cast, with 965,236. Douglas saw 75% turnout. Some counties in rural Nebraska saw turnout of over 80% of registered voters, including Arthur, Hooker and Thomas Counties in the Sandhills.
Only the pandemic-fueled 2020 election had more votes cast, at 966,920. And only the 1968 presidential election had a higher percentage turnout – 81% of registered voters. This year’s statewide turnout was 76%.
Kathurima said Nebraskans won’t know how many people might have voted because “any voter restriction … will always have a chilling effect.”
In other states with voter ID, restrictions have disproportionately reduced voting by people in poverty, the elderly and the infirm. Much depends on the strictness of IDs required.
Voter ID advocates have argued that the requirements help reduce election fraud by making it more difficult to impersonate another voter. Many are particularly interested in requiring ID to vote by mail.
The push drew more attention after the 2020 election, when then-President Donald Trump criticized voting by mail after his loss to President Joe Biden and questioned the verification processes.
Kathurima and Uhing said they would like to see the state tweak the training help offered to poll workers to emphasize which IDs are acceptable. Signs clarifying what IDs are accepted could also be more prominent at polling places, they suggested.
Evnen said his office would take that feedback from stakeholders and work with local election officials to see what they can learn from it and improve.
Several advocates acknowledged the work Nebraska election officials have done educating voters, including tapping into $1.5 million in funding for outreach. They also credited Nebraska for passing a more flexible version of voter ID than some states.
But some said it should matter to Nebraskans that a number of “votes did not count in this election,” as Uhing said.
“If they didn’t come back to resolve that, that’s a real shame,” she said. “We have to go back … and understand how people might be moved to go back (and fix their ballots).”