On July 29th, three judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals used essentially this reasoning when they issued an 83-page ruling saying it is no accident that North Carolina’s voting law looks, sounds and functions like an effort to suppress the voices of black voters. A team of judges described those same provisions as targeting “African-Americans with nearly surgical precision”, and imposing “cures for problems that did not exist”. Rather “the legislature amended the bill to exclude numerous alternative photo IDs used by African Americans” while simultaneously retaining “only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess”. Still, the string of opinions over the past two-plus weeks has the feel of a potentially decisive shift in how courts treat these laws.
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On Friday, federal judges overturned restrictive, discriminatory voting laws in both North Carolina and Wisconsin. Should the justices take a major voting rights case in the near future, the result could be a clear statement that targeting voters on account of their race is illegal, even with Shelby County still standing.
“The effect you’re going to see is increased turnout among African Americans, Latinos, and people with low incomes”, said Jason Roberts, a University of North Carolina political science professor, whose interview was published in an article about the decision on Bloomberg.com.
Motz and the two other members of the three-judge panel are all Democratic appointees. “I cannot live as a democratic citizen observing the laws I have helped to enact – I can only submit to the edict of others”.
She noted that the state loosened the photo-ID requirement a bit in 2015 by allowing voters without acceptable ID to vote if they signed an affidavit saying they had a “reasonable impediment” to getting one.
In North Carolina, the legislature acted immediately after the Supreme Court decision came down. “Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans”. Thus, we do not ask whether the State has an interest in preventing voter fraud-it does-or whether a photo ID requirement constitutes one way to serve that interest-it may-but whether the legislature would have enacted SL 2013-381’s photo ID requirement if it had no disproportionate impact on African American voters.
The bill required voter-ID, decreased the number of early voting days, and changed policies such as same-day registration. It challenged the 2013 law-which is widely held to be one of the most restrictive in the nation-arguing that it stood in violation of the 14th and 26th Amendments as well as the Voting Rights Act with the specific goal of disenfranchising the Black citizens of the state whom studies show are less likely to have the narrowly defined identification that is required to cast their votes. Judge Richard Posner, a conservative who wrote the appeals court decision that approved the same law, has gone further.
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Marc Elias, an attorney whose law firm has challenged voting restrictions in several states including Wisconsin and North Carolina, said the recent rulings are steps toward correcting “voting restriction laws put in place by Republican legislators”. Election law experts doubt the justices will issue an emergency injunction or agree hear a full appeal of the case. Besides working on the voting rights case, he also is involved in a separate challenge to redistricting plans for state and congressional legislative districts in North Carolina. That is bad news for Donald Trump, who likely needs the Tar Heel state in his column if he hopes to win the presidency.
