In the 2012 election for example, North Carolina election officials told state legislators that after doing a cross-check of voter records among 28 other states, it identified 765 voters whose first and last names, date of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number matched exactly with a voter registered in another state and voted in both states.
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However, the state still has options to seek a delay of the 4th Circuit’s decision.
On Friday, a federal appeals court struck down the core of a North Carolina law that required voters to show photo ID, eliminated opportunities to vote early and to register to vote on Election Day, among other things.
The governor’s office says they’re still determining what step they want to take next, including whether they want to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Deeming them to be discriminatory, the three-judge panel decided the bill was strategically seeking to suppress the black voters of North Carolina.
But now even Republican judges are seeing through those phantom arguments – and seeing the threat to our democracy.
– In the most significant of the three rulings, a federal appeals court in North Carolina scrapped requirements that voting-rights advocates have characterized as reeking of the Jim Crow era.
The timing of North Carolina’s law also reinforced suspicions that the GOP agenda was voter suppression along racial lines.
Motz said in regard to this one part of the states voting regime, she would have temporarily banned the photo ID requirement, rather than subject it to a permanent injunction. In 2013, a bare majority of the U.S. supreme court gave the green light to North Carolina by striking down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required states, like North Carolina, that had a history of discrimination to preclear electoral law changes with the Department of Justice.
A statement issued by Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, and House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, on June 29, called the decision by the three-judge panel “partisan” and attempted to tie their ruling to Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton and N.C. Attorney General and Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Roy Cooper, who would now be allowed to “steal the election”.
McCrory said the primary elections with the voter ID law in place when “extremely well”.
The latest opinion came down on Monday when a federal judge in North Dakota granted a preliminary injunction requiring North Dakota to institute fail safe provisions in its voter ID law. Earlier in July, a federal court struck down a Texas voter ID law saying that it was discriminatory.
It wasn’t that long ago that North Carolina was reputed by many as the most inclusive and socially progressive state in the South.
That decision prevented the Justice Department from reviewing state laws that restrict voter access before they are enacted until Congress passes a new law – unlikely under Washington’s current gridlock.
“To assume there’s not the potential for people abusing the ballot box when there’s so much at stake and so much money I think is being naive”, McCrory said of the upcoming general election.
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They didn’t stop when the voter fraud myth was repeatedly debunked. Notably, the legislature also had evidence the absentee voting was not disproportionately used by African Americans; indeed, whites disproportionately used absentee voting.
