It was a panel consisting of three judges from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia that declared the North Carolina law unconstitutional, stating that lawmakers “enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history” when voting laws were rewritten in 2013. “To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease”.
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The Rev. Moses Colbert said he couldn’t vote in 2014 because election officials lost his paperwork.
In the wake of a decision Friday by a federal appeals court in Virginia, North Carolina residents won’t have to worry about flashing a photo ID when they cast a ballot on November 8 for offices ranging all the way up to the presidency.
Perhaps Republicans and Democrats in this state can work together on a voter ID law that will protect a legitimately cast vote without denying anyone the right to do so.
Supporters of the law, like North Carolina Gov.
But while election year political maneuvering may indeed be at play, the back-to-back defeats for voter ID laws have laid out evidence that racially discriminatory intent – in other words, racism – still shapes election policy in the South and beyond.
In addition to requiring photo identification when voting, North Carolina’s bill also cut early voting days and banned same-day voter registration.
Two federal rulings issued this week strike at the core of states’ voter identification laws, judging at least two states’ efforts to allegedly combat voter fraud were thinly veiled attempts to disenfranchise the poor and minorities.
The rulings follow a blow earlier this month to what critics said was one of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws in Texas. The federal panel also pointed out that the two forms of identification the state required for getting a voter ID card were also “the very same forms of ID excluded by the law”.
“The legislature amended the bill to exclude numerous alternative photo IDs used by African-Americans (and) retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess”, the ruling reads.
Dale Ho, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Projects, questions a witness during a court hearing on whether Kansas must count potentially thousands of votes in state and local races from people who’ve registered without providing proof of their USA citizenship, Friday, July 29, 2016, in Topeka, Kan.
“Although the new provisions target African Americans with nearly surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist”, said the panel.
In the Kansas ruling, a county judge said the state must count thousands of votes in local and state elections from people who did not provide proof of USA citizenship when they registered.
“This is a strong rebuke to what the North Carolina General Assembly did in 2013”, said Allison Riggs of the League of Women Voters.
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“The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities”, U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote. “While fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent”, they wrote. Hendricks blocked an administrative rule from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. “Yet three Democratic judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state”, McCrory, a Republican, said in a statement. He struck down a restriction limiting municipalities to one location for in-person absentee voting, time limits on in-person absentee voting, an increase in residency requirements from 10 to 28 days, and a prohibition on using expired but otherwise qualifying student IDs to vote.
