The state’s voter ID law is still being argued in federal court.
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The Friday ruling is a huge win for voting rights activists in a closely watched case in a potential 2016 swing state.
The Texas attorney general’s office, which will defend the practice in court, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The 2013 rewrite to voting laws in North Carolina required photo identification to cast in-person ballots and made other changes.
“The district court rejected contentions that the challenged provisions violate the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments of the Constitution”.
That legislation, the Court ruled, was enacted after lawmakers “requested data on use, by race, of various voting practices”.
“We can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent”, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel, according to the Post.
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In the opinion, the panel of judges said that the law restricted voting in ways that “disproportionately affected African Americans” and that its provisions targeted “African Americans with nearly surgical precision”. “This ruling is a stinging rebuke of the state’s attempt to undermine African-American voter participation, which had surged over the last decade”, said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. The seven members of the Louisiana Supreme Court are elected by district, and MS is divided into three districts that each elect three justices, he said. But the appeals court found that the lower court erred by seeing the law’s goals as partisan rather than race-based. The North Carolina Republican Party planned to respond to the ruling at a 2:30 news conference. This fact constitutes a critical – perhaps the most critical – piece of historical evidence here. The district court failed to recognize this linkage, leading it to accept “politics as usual; as a justification for numerous changes in [the voting law]”.
