Voter ID - a discriminatory law struck down

North Carolina’s 2013 election law was advertised as preventing voter fraud. Instead, it has been exposed as fraudulent lawmaking – voter suppression in the guise of voting protections.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit delivered that stinging ruling Friday. A three-judge panel unanimously found that the requirement of a valid photo ID to vote and other election law changes made by the Republican-controlled General Assembly were targeted at illegally suppressing the votes of certain minorities, especially African-Americans.

North Carolinians heading to the polls this November can put away their photo IDs. The full early voting period will be restored. Out-of-precinct votes will count again. People will once more be able to register and vote on the same day. And North Carolina will go back to being a state that encourages rather than obstructs voting.

These will all be good restorations for North Carolina, but their return is a stain on the state’s Republican leadership. Not only did the Republicans deny many voters – the primary election saw thousands of votes thrown out under the new law – they claimed they were protecting voter integrity even as they failed to apply a photo ID to absentee ballots, which tend to support Republicans.

At the district court level, Judge Thomas Schroeder accepted the Republican leadership’s benign claims, but the the Fourth Circuit judges saw the law’s plain intent.

Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for the panel, noted in the ruling that Republican lawmakers requested election data by race and waited until after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act before they passed a Republican wish-list of election law changes, all of them disproportionately restraining voting by African-Americans.

Motz wrote: “In response to claims that intentional racial discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.”

This ruling comes shortly after the Fourth Circuit also threw as racially discriminatory the legislature’s changes in Wake County elections for school board and Board of County Commissioners. And it adds another legal defeat for a reckless Republican leadership that been challenged for enshrining in law discrimination against gay and transgender people. Its state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was rendered moot by a Supreme Court decision upholding the right and its notorious House Bill 2 denial of gay and transgender rights is being challenged by the U.S. Department of Justice, among others.

This is also another case of Republican lawmakers ignoring sound legal advice of Attorney General Roy Cooper, now the Democratic nominee for governor. Cooper said before the legislature voted on the law, “The legislature needs be very careful before it starts restricting the places people can vote, the times people can vote, the requirements for people to vote.”

The legislature wasn’t careful. The state’s Republican leadership – Senate Leader Phil Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore and Gov. Pat McCrory – should be chastened by the federal courts repeated rejection of their laws as discriminatory. But there will be no contrition or change of heart. They will complain about political judges and “the left” and “the elite” and continue in their abusive lawmaking and the diminishing of North Carolina’s reputation.

But Friday’s ruling explodes their fictions and makes it easier for all North Carolina voters to be heard and the state’s true values upheld.

This story was originally published July 29, 2016 at 8:31 PM with the headline "Voter ID - a discriminatory law struck down."