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.
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MARTIN: Now, the photo ID requirement is one that gets a lot of attention, but could you tell us more about what made the voting law in North Carolina so noxious to voting rights advocates? These are all laws that are passed by Republican legislatures against the views of Democrats.
The decisions handed down last week come on the heels of two other recent rulings against GOP-sponsored voter ID laws, in Texas and Kansas, and they seem virtually certain to have an impact on what is developing as a closely contested general election race in November.
Looking to Advertise? Contact the Crusader for more information. Around a million push cards and informational posters became outdated and fodder for the dump overnight, and intense editing will be required for election rules for 2,700 precincts around the state.
Earlier in July, a federal court struck down a Texas voter ID law saying that it was discriminatory. It does have the option of appealing the decision to the full Fourth Circuit, or it can appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Already this year, a federal court struck down North Carolina’s congressional boundaries, which had to be redrawn before separate primaries in June.
With the presidential election just three months away, a federal court ruling tossing out North Carolina’s voter ID law and other adjoining provisions has also overturned voting plans at county election offices here and across the state. Readers may remember Republicans based this national push for election restrictions on repeating the claim that voting fraud was rampant in America.
“Changing our state’s election laws close to the upcoming election, including common sense voter ID, will create confusion for voters and poll workers, :” McCrory said in a statement. That state’s voter ID law remains on the books, but with several limitations. In Missouri and elsewhere, lawmakers have been more circumspect, arguing that you need a photo ID to board an airplane, so why not to vote?
This comes as a piece of good news as gradually the racially bigoted laws of the US are becoming a matter of the past. “Upon receipt of the race data”, the ruling notes, “the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans”.
The judges also noted that legislators showed no evidence of voter fraud at the polls, even though much of the reasoning for the identification provision was pegged to the possibility that people were fraudulently casting ballots.
State Senate Leader Phil Berger and state House Speaker Tim Moore, both Republicans, said the opinion had been issued “by three partisan Democrats” and said that it “ignores legal precedent”.
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“We think it is the proper law and it’s awesome that the attorney general will not fulfill the responsibility of his oath of office to defend our laws of North Carolina”, McCrory told reporters.
