A federal appeals court on Friday blocked a North Carolina law that required voters to produce photo identification and follow other rules disproportionately affecting minorities, finding that the law was meant to make it harder for blacks to vote in the presidential battleground state.
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On Friday, a three-judge panel of the Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked North Carolina’s law that limited to six the number of acceptable photo IDs. They join the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which also shredded Republicans’ voter fraud fallacy earlier this month in striking down Texas’s voter ID law.
“We can only wonder if the intent is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and (state Attorney General) Roy Cooper to steal the election”, said a statement from state lawmakers Phil Berger and Tim Moore, who argued that the decision ignored legal precedent.
The provisions “target African-Americans with nearly surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist”, the judges wrote.
Dale Hicks said he couldn’t vote in 2014 after the new law eliminated same-day registration. The U.S. Justice Department, state NAACP and League of Women Voters were among those who sued over the restrictions. “Rather, the General Assembly enacted them in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting”.
Voting rights advocates heralded the court’s decision as a major victory.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the court’s ruling upheld Americans’ ability “to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation”, in remarks she delivered on Friday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Sen. Jeff Jackson, D-Mecklenburg, said without an immediate appeal, the voter ID law would not be in effect this election. Academic studies find nearly no instances of the type of voter fraud that Republican legislatures are ostensibly trying to prevent-in-person deception. According to the Charlotte Observer, North Carolina voters will no longer be required to show a photo ID when voting, and 16- and 17-year-olds can once again pre-register to vote. African Americans have been reliable Democrat voters and party members believe the voter identification law may be a ploy to suppress their vote. “Winning an election does not empower anyone in any party to engage in purposeful racial discrimination”. The New Orleans-based USA 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said Texas’ voter ID law is discriminatory and must be weakened before the November election. Today the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated these restrictions, which it said “targeted African Americans with nearly surgical precision” in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment.
He said the rulings are steps toward correcting “voting restriction laws put in place by Republican legislators”.
He ordered the state to quickly issue credentials valid for voting to anyone trying to obtain a free photo ID for voting.
One of the most comprehensive studies on the subject found only 31 individual cases of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States since the year 2000.
In the Kansas ruling, a county judge said the state must count thousands of votes in local and state elections from people who did not provide proof of US citizenship when they registered.
The order from Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks came only four days before Tuesday’s primary election. Hendricks blocked an administrative rule from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
A county judge in Kansas on Friday also issued a temporary order on a rule that required proof of USA citizenship to vote in state and local races, a move that could allow up to 50,000 additional people to cast ballots in November, according to the AP.
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The affected voters were to receive provisional ballots to be reviewed later, and county election officials were directed to count only their votes for federal offices, not state and area ones.
