The North Carolina case gives Kennedy an opportunity to show whether he was serious when he suggested that Section 3 would provide a backstop against states that still engage in voting discrimination.
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His reference is to a case decided last week, North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, in which a federal Court of Appeals unanimously struck down a North Carolina voting law, passed by a Republican legislature with the clear intention of disenfranchising black (Democrat) voters.
In decision after decision, courts have clearly and unambiguously rendered clear-eyed rulings-from Texas to Wisconsin to North Carolina to Kansas to MI to North Dakota-arguing that these state legislatures willfully pushed racist laws with the exclusive intent to restrict African Americans and other voters of color from exercising their franchise rights.
Election officials are scrambling to comply with last week’s federal appeals court ruling striking down North Carolina’s voter photo identification mandate and other restrictions Republicans approved three years ago.
Over the past month, a set of state-level voter suppressions laws have fallen like shaky dominoes on a tilted floor. Another judge has ruled that those who are unable to obtain photo-ID in Wisconsin may instead vote by signing an affidavit. It was an important victory for voting rights, as North Carolina’s law was widely viewed as the most aggressive voter suppression law in the nation and now it is largely neutered. They contend these tough new laws are targeting “phantom” crimes that don’t really exist. But given the demographic patterns of who votes for which party, the easiest way for them to gain that edge is by putting bureaucratic hurdles in place that make it harder for poor and elderly minority voters to cast ballots.
Not exactly the smoking gun that was needed a new law to try and suppress a USA citizen’s constitutional right once they turn 18. Voter-ID fraud is virtually nonexistent.
Additionally, the legislature requested racial data on early voting, same-day registration and provisional voting and curbed those practices knowing they were disproportionately used by blacks, the ruling stated. The new law restricted early voting, imposed photo ID requirements, ended same-day registration and preregistration for minors, and ended out-of-district provisional voting.
Supporters of the voter ID law say it helps prevent voter fraud.
The state’s voter ID law, at least on paper, makes sense because eliminating voter fraud should be the goal of members of both parties.
“While we recognize that the NBA.cannot choose the law in every city, state and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by the current law”, the organization said in a statement. In Virginia, expert testimony in an ongoing federal challenge to the state’s voter-ID statute, enacted in 2013, indicates that the law’s burden of inconvenience falls disproportionately on black and Hispanic voters, who are less likely to have the mandated forms of ID. As Berman notes: “We’re less than 100 days from the election now, and this is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act”.
When the ruling came out, McCrory had characterized it as “three Democratic judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state”, as the Washington Post reported.
The judges wrote that in the years before the North Carolina law took effect, registration and participation by black voters had been dramatically increasing.
In 2013, the high court struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. “North Carolina is now, without question, a battleground state in which the Hillary Clinton campaign and other Democrats have received a major boost”.
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Excluding minority voters because they tend to vote for one party over another is nothing more than an attempt to remove minority voices from vital policy debates and avoid addressing the political needs and demands of those communities. Or as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump warned with no evidence, “We may have people vote 10 times”.
