“Because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history”, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel, all Democratic appointees.
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“The key part of the holding is that North Carolina acted with racially discriminatory intent”, he wrote. On Friday, the three judges that preside over the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that showing government-issued identification in order to vote was unconstitutional.
Before enacting the 2013 law, lawmakers requested data on the use, by race, of several voting practices, according to the ruling.
Peterson’s ruling comes just days after a different federal judge eased Wisconsin’s strict voter identification requirements.
“The legislature amended the bill to exclude numerous alternative photo IDs used by African-Americans (and) retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess”, the ruling reads. The law also decreased the time period for residents to vote early.
Civil rights groups hailed the decision as a major victory. “Now that the burden has been lifted, I think we can expect more turnout”.
“We can not ignore the recent evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history”, Judge Diana Motz wrote. The state that also has closely contested races for U.S. Senate and governor. Democrats, hoping to regain a majority, are eyeing Republican Sen. Put together, the decisions suggest a growing judicial suspicion of the wave of voting-restriction legislation passed in recent years by Republican-led legislatures. “Three Democratic judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state”, Gov. Pat McCrory said in a statement.
A federal appeals court blocked a North Carolina law requiring photo identification to cast in-person ballots, ruling Friday that it was enacted “with discriminatory intent”. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting.
In 2013, in the seminal Shelby v. Holder case, Chief Justice John Roberts, too, recounted a time “when less than 7 percent of African-Americans in MS were registered to vote”, adding that, today, “there are examples of progress more poignant than the numbers”.
“The law required in-person voters to show certain photo IDs, beginning in 2016, which African Americans disproportionately lacked, and eliminated or reduced registration and voting access tools that African Americans disproportionately used”, the decision explains.
In its blistering decision Friday, the appellate court firmly rejected that reasoning, charging that the state had devised “cures for problems that did not exist”.
Instead, the judges concluded, the legislature embarked on an obviously partisan effort to solidify Republican control of state government by targeting black voters “with nearly surgical precision” and undermining a key Democratic voting bloc. Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination. “The record evidence is clear that this is exactly what was done here”.
“Although the new provisions target African Americans with nearly surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist”, the opinion states.
Voting rights proponents hailed the North Carolina decision.
Quotes pulled from the court’s decision, reported Friday on the Washington post, detail the discriminatory law. With this year’s elections creeping up swiftly, its effects will only be seen come November.
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The Fourth Circuit ruled that North Carolina’s law targeted “African Americans with nearly surgical precision” by using data on the most common forms of ID by different races “to exclude numerous alternative photo IDs used by African Americans”.
