As he’s been known to do from time-to-time, Fox News Channel (FNC) anchor Shepard Smith flashed his liberal tilt on Wednesday afternoon in reading a simple news brief about the Supreme Court putting a stay on North Carolina’s voter I.D. law by lamenting that, in his book, such laws are meant to discourage minorities from voting.
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The law, considered one of the nation’s most restrictive, not only required IDs but eliminated same-day registration, stopped voters from casting ballots in the wrong precinct, and shortened the early voting period from 17 days to 10.
Audio clip: Listen to audio clip. However, the four who might favor that review might hesitate to do so because there would appear to be no realistic chance that they could pick up a fifth vote to make up a majority for a final decision. This is an important outcome for Democrats, who rely on the support of African-American voters, especially in a state expected to be a battleground for the presidential, Senate and governor elections.
The Supreme Court has shut the door on restoring North Carolina’s voter ID laws – for now. That data showed that blacks were more likely than whites to lack ID, and to use all those forms of voting except absentee voting, which was used more by whites. Absentee ballots are “disproportionately used by whites”, the court said, while the voter ID restrictions enacted “target African-Americans with nearly surgical precision”. Courts have also rejected all or parts of voting plans in Texas and Wisconsin.
The North Carolina law was left undisturbed because of a 4-4 by a shorthanded Supreme Court.
And although lawmakers said they sought to prevent fraud, they did not “identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud”, the appeals court noted.
Despite pleas not to curtail early voting, Mecklenburg County elections officials voted this month to cut the overall number of early voting hours by 238, even while opening as many as 22 sites.
The justices on Wednesday declined a request by Republican Gov.
All four conservatives joined Crawford v. Marion County, the 2008 case that gave a green light to voter ID laws, saying, essentially, that there was no need for IN to show evidence of voter fraud to justify its ID measure.
North Carolina’s voting restrictions had been passed by a GOP-controlled Legislature in 2013 but then struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on July 29.
The Fourth Circuit agreed with civil rights groups and said the North Carolina law singles out minorities with “almost surgical precision”, ruling it unconstitutional. In McLaughlin’s survey of over 800 Hispanic registered voters, 13 percent admitted they were not citizens of the United States.
Controversy over the Tar Heel State’s voting laws will only continue.
The case is North Carolina v.
North Carolina won’t have a voter ID law in place for the November elections this year.
“Hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians will now be able to vote without barriers”, Allison Riggs, an attorney representing some of the groups and voters who originally sued over the 2013 law, said in a statement.
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Citing the approaching date of the election, Clement asked the court only to reinstate three provisions of the law before the next election.
