North Carolina had “contradicted some of the most basic principles of our democracy”, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.
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That means the current decision will nearly certainly guide North Carolina’s 2016 election, raising questions about voting irregularities and the ability of the state to conduct a fair election. At the same time, the decision was being lauded by the NAACP, ACLU and the countless advocates for equality of voter rights, the opposition was not happy.
On Friday [July 29] a federal appeals court blocked legislation in North Carolina that requires voters to show identification after discovering that it disproportionately affected voters of color in comparison to their white counterparts, making it more hard for Black voters to cast their ballot.
Marc Elias, an attorney whose law firm has challenged voting restrictions in several states including Wisconsin and North Carolina, said the recent rulings are steps toward correcting “voting restriction laws put in place by Republican legislators”.
“The court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees.
This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina”, Motz wrote. The court deemed that voter photo ID laws unfairly impact black voters. Early voting will run October 20 through November 5, and same-day registration will be available at early voting sites.
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”.
Allison Riggs of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, who argued on behalf of the League of Women Voters, called it “a strong rebuke to the General Assembly’s attempt to restrict political participation”. Perhaps forgetting that the 2013 voter ID law was rushed through a Republican-held legislature in only three days, N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, and state House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican from Cleveland County, issued a joint statement on Friday.
Although the State could appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, it is unlikely that court would issue a decision before election day.
In Wisconsin, a federal judge threw out multiple aspects of the state’s voter ID law but left the body of laws itself intact after it was challenge in May. It reversed a 485-page decision by the district court upholding the law. Praising the ruling, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said, “without a question”, the city would take advantage of the ruling. Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices.
The timing “looks pretty bad to me”, Floyd said, prompting murmurs of agreement from the courtroom packed with opponents of the law, some of whom traveled from North Carolina to the Richmond-based appeals court. It’s why nine months after the first ballots were cast, we still don’t have a mayor in Pembroke. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting.
“The district court clearly erred” when it failed to find discriminatory intent and when it believed North Carolina’s interests in passing the legislation to be compelling, she wrote. They were also disproportionately less likely to have an ID, more likely to cast a provisional ballot and take advantage of pre-registration.
The court’s decision also canceled provisions of the law that scaled back early voting, prevented residents from registering and voting on the same day, and eliminated the ability of voters to vote outside their assigned precinct.
For Theodore Shaw, a UNC law professor and director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, the ruling represented a significant turning point for voter participation. But the judge’s decision meant around 17,000 voters would have their ballots counted in the upcoming elections for the state legislature.
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The state has appealed the ruling. A federal appeals court said Texas’ voter ID law is discriminatory and must be weakened before the November election. Pat McCrory vowed to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
