Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton signaled the fight wasn’t over despite the compromise for this election and didn’t rule out eventually going to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The appeals court ruling struck down provisions of the law which required photo IDs at the polls and eliminating a week of early voting, same day registration and out of precinct voting.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday refused the state’s request to put its decision on hold while North Carolina asks the Supreme Court to overturn it ahead of the U.S. general election on November 8.
Three liberal Democrat judges who overturned North Carolina’s voter ID law previously upheld in court got it wrong, undermining the integrity of our elections while maligning our state. The ruling strikes down Wisconsin’s Voter ID requirement, limits imposed on early voting hours, restrictions on the number of early-voting sites, lengthening residency requirements, a prohibition against providing absentee ballots by email or fax, and more. He added that the early voting period will be reinstated, and expand from 10 to 17 days.
Friday’s opinion from a three-judge panel states that “the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history” when it rewrote voting laws in 2013. In the process they also rip to shreds the enduring Republican falsehood that the laws were created to curb rampant voter fraud.
The court found that the photo ID requirement disproportionately excluded African-American voters because they were less likely to have the forms of identification required under the law. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a national leader in Republican voter restriction efforts, had pushed through a rule that would have set those votes aside, perhaps up to 50,000 by the November election.
In their recent decisions, judges on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals have agreed with the academics. So the odds are very high that the presidential and Senate battleground of North Carolina will hold its general election without the “reform” law in effect.
Kobach said the decision would allow people living in the US illegally to vote, although voting rights advocates say there have been few cases of voter fraud in the past.
State Board of Elections Executive Director Kim Westbrook Strach said her office is now reviewing the court’s decision.
Report written by Judge Diana Motz on behalf of the other two judges: James Wynn and Henry Floyd, reads, “The record makes clear that the historical origin of the challenged provisions in this statute is not the innocuous back-and-forth of routine partisan struggle that the State suggests and that the district court accepted”.
Finally, we observe that our injunction merely returns North Carolina’s voting procedures to the status quo prevailing before the discriminatory law was enacted.
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“Court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls”, the court said, quoting from a 2006 Supreme Court case.
