UNC-Chapel Hill is one of many colleges and universities with school-issued photo identification cards approved by the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
But UNC-Chapel Hill officials also applied this year for approval to let students and employees use the digital photo IDs known as One Cards stored on their Apple Wallets.
The bipartisan elections board split 3-2 on the request.
The board's two Republicans objected because the statutory language repeatedly refers to "identification cards," which they argued meant physical cards, not digital identification.
"What we're being asked to approve here is an identification on a mobile app," said board member Stacy Eggers, who is an attorney. "And a mobile app is not an identification card."
However, Siobhan Millen, a retired lawyer and one of the five-member board's three Democrats, accused Eggers of being "a little formalistic."
"If a young person uses a credit card to buy groceries on their phone from their Apple Wallet, they're still using a credit card," Millen countered. "We still would call it a credit card."
A staff attorney told the board that UNC-Chapel Hill's digital ID met all the statutory criteria for use as a form of voter identification, including having an expiration date.
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