North Carolina voter law in play as state appeals to Supreme Court
North Carolina officials are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a law that would make sweeping changes to the way thousands of minority and student voters cast ballots in next month’s elections, state electoral officials said Thursday.
The legal battle could have major implications for state elections, including one that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate next year. Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan currently has a narrow lead in the polls over Thom Tillis, the speaker of the state House of Representatives. Tillis was one of the architects of the voting law, which slashes or ends practices such as early voting, same-day registration, and casting ballots in a different precinct, which are widely used by African American, Latino, and student voters.
He and other GOP lawmakers have said the legislation, enacted in August 2013, was intended to restore confidence in elections.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, rejected that argument [PDF], as they issued a temporary injunction to block the law’s implementation for this year’s vote. The court found 2-1 that “undisputed evidence” showed the law would disproportionately burden African-American voters. Judge James Wynn wrote for the majority that the state had “rushed to pass” the law following the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby v. Holder, which overturned parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that applied to states including North Carolina. Joined by Judge Henry Floyd, he wrote that the threats to electoral integrity that the law sought to prevent were “merely imaginable.”
The state board of elections countered that the injunction would force last-minute changes to election procedures. “More than 4 million voter guides have gone to the public with information contrary to [the] decision,” said the board’s executive director, Kim Westbrook Strach. Board of elections spokesman Joshua Lawson told Al Jazeera the state filed its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.
North Carolina’s NAACP president, the Rev. William Barber rejected Strach’s reasoning at a Thursday press conference, saying that state officials should have had a plan B all along, knowing that the new law could be found unconstitutional. “That’s your job, not a burden,” he told the board via a Thursday press conference. Barber applauded the appeals court ruling as “the first major victory for the sanctity of constitutional voting rights since Shelby.”
The current legal battle only concerns whether the North Carolina voting law will be implemented in time for the upcoming Nov. 4 election. It is not likely to affect a delayed provision requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, which does not go into effect until 2016. A trial over the constitutionality of the entire law is expected next year.
It is now up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to hear the case. There may be worrying signs for the Plaintiffs if they do: Earlier this week, the high court ruled 5-4 that Ohio could go ahead with a similar law curtailing early voting there.
