Another court blocks NC voter ID law, citing ‘racially discriminatory intent’
[Charlotte Observer]
Will Doran
,Charlotte Observer•February 18, 2020
https://news.yahoo.com/another-court-blocks-nc-voter-155313756.html
North Carolina’s new voter ID law appears to have been enacted with racially discriminatory intent and will be at least temporarily blocked during the 2020 elections, the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.
A federal court has already blocked the voter ID mandate at least through the 2020 primary elections, which are underway now. Tuesday’s decision — in a separate lawsuit in state courts rather than federal courts — could also extend that block until the general election in November.
The voter ID law was written after voters passed a new constitutional amendment in 2018 requiring photo ID to vote. However, this is now the second court to rule that African-American voters could be harmed by the way the Republican-led legislature wrote the law behind the amendment.
The judges issued what’s called a preliminary injunction, which is not a permanent ban on voter ID. It simply blocks the law from going into effect while the lawsuit is still underway. So if the case is still in the courts in November — which is entirely possible — then voters won’t have to show ID then, either.
Based on the evidence they’ve seen so far, the three judges who heard the case wrote, it appears the legislature will lose in its defense of the law. At one point in their ruling, the judges summarize a major part of the GOP defense and then add that those arguments “fundamentally miss the point.”
The activists who sued appear likely to be able to prove “that discriminatory intent was a motivating factor behind” the voter ID law, the judges wrote.
“Today, the state Court of Appeals has chosen to unanimously side with democracy,” said Wayne Goodwin, chairman of the N.C. Democratic Party, in a press release. “This Republican legislature has repeatedly targeted African Americans with surgical precision to keep them from making their voices heard.”
“We need to make it easier to vote — not harder,” he added.
How voter ID was passed
The constitutional amendment won around 55% of the vote in November 2018. Lawmakers came back to Raleigh a few weeks later — after Democrats had flipped enough seats in the election to eliminate the GOP’s veto-proof supermajority, but before those new Democratic lawmakers could be sworn in — to write the details of the law.
The judges wrote that the lame-duck voting session meant the law was written quickly, with “limited debate and public input and without further study of the law’s effects on minority voters.”
The Republican-backed bill passed almost entirely along party lines, and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it, to no avail. One black Democrat, former Charlotte Sen. Joel Ford, co-sponsored the bill and voted to overturn Cooper’s veto.
Last month, Ford told the News & Observer: “My motivation was the pure protection of the vote and to help people who did not have an ID secure one.”
In the wake of Tuesday’s ruling, Republicans have pointed to Ford’s support of the law as evidence that it couldn’t have been racist. Many have also echoed Ford’s point about helping people get IDs. Before the law was blocked in federal court, local boards of election were giving out free ID cards to people who asked for them.
Pat Ryan, a spokesman for Republican Senate leader Phil Berger, said in an interview Tuesday that the legislature had been careful to write a grace period into the law, so that people would still be able to vote without an ID if they could claim one of several excuses that were written into the law.
Details of the ruling
In their ruling, the judges specifically pointed to the legislature’s past history with racially motivated voter ID laws — a 2013 law that included voter ID among other election changes was struck down in federal court after it was found to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” — as well as issues in the 2018 law that indicate it, too, was motivated by a desire to make it harder for black people to vote.
“This is especially true where the Amendment itself allows for exceptions to any voter-ID law, yet the evidence shows the General Assembly specifically left out types of IDs that African Americans disproportionately lack,” the judges wrote. “Such a choice speaks more of an intention to target African American voters rather than a desire to comply with the newly created Amendment in a fair and balanced manner.”
That was a reference to the legislature’s decision not to allow voters to use public assistance IDs, said Allison Riggs, a lawyer for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represented the challengers.