How does NC fare in voter access? It depends on who you ask.

North Carolina voter access issues have been a hot topic with new legislation coming to the forefront and litigation following it.

On opposite sides of the political spectrum, opinions about what these laws mean for voter access are complicated.

Two organizations have set out to grade states on their overall voter access, but they're not in agreement.

Here's how North Carolina fared in the contrasting reports.

The Institute for Responsive Government report

The Institute for Responsive Government, a left-leaning organization, hopes for government and elections to be more user-friendly and accessible. They took into account things like access to automatic voter registration, online voter registration, same day registration, restoration of rights, vote by mail options and early voting opportunities when creating their scorecard called the Election Policy Progress Report.

There are two aspects to the rating. First, the tier rating. This is based on overall "pro-voter" policies. In this category, North Carolina was put into the mid-tier. The second being the letter grade that they base on actions from the past two years in the legislature. This is where North Carolina received an "F."

The report states that the "legislature curtailed voter access and stripped the power over election boards from the Governor to give it to themselves." They also cite Senate Bill 747 as one of North Carolina's downfalls.

The bill focuses on election law changes, but more specifically, one item required that mail-in ballots be received by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day rather than retaining a three-day buffer period. Another aspect of the bill made changes to address verification protocol for same-day registration. The bill also proposed a pilot program wherein the Board of Elections will verify signatures on mail-in ballots. The Democratic National Committee and the North Carolina Democratic Party filed a lawsuit challenging the bill. In January, they received relief in regard to the bill's address verification protocol for same-day registration.

The only other state that received an "F" in 2023 was South Dakota. Most of the states given lower grades are clumped in the middle of the country whereas the higher rated states are mostly located on the coasts.

When the report card was published, it referenced data from the beginning of 2023 and it did not account for the implementation of Senate Bill 824 which makes photo ID required when voting.

View North Carolina's, and all 50 states', full scorecard at the Institute for Responsive Government website.

The Heritage Foundation report

A conservative-leaning think tank, the Heritage Foundation, views North Carolina voter laws as a safeguard for election integrity. The Heritage Foundation attributes things like voter photo ID implementation and restriction of same-day and automatic voter registration as giving the state a better score. They gave North Carolina a 70/100 in their Election Integrity Scorecard. Seventy percent ranks the state 18th out of 50.

The report card breaks the ratings into five tiers, each with colors ranging from red to green, bright green being the best and bright red the worst. Their ranking system clumps percentiles 11-20 together to make up the second place tier in light green -- that's where NC sits along with Texas, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky and others. Southern states like South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee received the highest green first tier ranking whereas coastal states like Washington, California and New York got the lowest tier in bright red.

Aside from publishing report cards, Heritage also tracks instances of voter fraud in their Election Fraud Database and argues that close elections could be affected by even minor instances of voter fraud.