In a series of rulings over the last two weeks, appellate courts across the country have been filling in the hole blown out of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 three years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court – moves that could help reshape November’s elections.
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Also on Friday, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson threw out key provisions of Wisconsin’s 2011 voter ID law, writing, “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections”.
North Carolina’s voting “reform” was typical of the overreaching style we’ve seen in the General Assembly in the past three or four years.
The decisions follow a similar blow to a Texas law that critics said was one of the nation’s most restrictive.
North Carolina’s attorney general won’t represent the state in appealing last week’s court ruling that overturned a voter ID mandate and other voting restrictions.
We suggested in a recent editorial that Americans – especially those interested in presidential politics and ready to vote come November – buckle their seat belts, because we’ve entered the home stretch of what will likely be the weirdest presidential campaign in USA history. “To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease”. Plans for 10 days of early voting will have to be revamped to cover 17 days. And in Kansas, a state with a foreign-born population of 6.8 percent, courts have repeatedly rejected efforts by the Republican secretary of state to require voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote. In North Carolina, restriction of voting mechanisms and procedures that most heavily affect African Americans will predictably redound to the benefit of one political party and to the disadvantage of the other.
“Because of these assurances, we are confident that North Carolina can conduct the 2016 election in compliance with our injunction”, the appeals court said in its follow-up order on Thursday.
Several other states have had election rules sidelined for the coming fall election.
With Donald Trump at the helm, the GOP needs to use every dirty trick in the book to try to “rig” the election in their favor, but they will find that much harder to do now that many of their voter-ID laws have been placed in the trash where they belong. Governor Pat McCrory and top Republican legislators have promised to appeal the decision.
Five votes on the eight-member Supreme Court are needed to grant a stay application.
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State Senate Leader Phil Berger and state House Speaker Tim Moore, both Republicans, said the opinion had been issued “by three partisan Democrats” and said that it “ignores legal precedent”. Sheriff’s deputies in Sparta, Georgia, have stopped black men on the streets and gone to the homes of black residents to demand proof that their voter registration is correct, The New York Times recently reported. They also eliminated same-day voter registration during the early-voting period, then chopped a week off that period – including Sunday voting.
