NC voter ID law written with ‘discriminatory intent,’ says judge who just blocked it
Racial discrimination was at least part of the motivation for a new voter ID law in North Carolina, a federal judge wrote Tuesday, striking the law down for now.
In a 60-page ruling evoking decades of racism in North Carolina, the judge wrote that parts of the new voter ID law “were impermissibly motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent.”
“North Carolina has a sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression stretching back to the time of slavery, through the era of Jim Crow, and, crucially, continuing up to the present day,” she wrote.
The last time North Carolina’s Republican-led General Assembly passed a voter ID law, in 2013, it was also struck down for racial discrimination. However, GOP leaders have repeatedly said they believed this newer version of the law, which was passed a year ago, avoided the racial issues the previous law ran into.
Loretta Biggs, a federal district court judge appointed by President Barack Obama, disagreed.
She wrote that “racial discrimination and racial polarization have historically pervaded North Carolina’s political climate — and still do.”
No ID despite voter approval
Her ruling means that although voters statewide approved a voter ID mandate as an amendment to the state constitution in the 2018 elections, people most likely will be able to vote without showing ID in at least the March primary election.
The issue of the general election in November is still unsettled, since it’s possible this issue could go to trial before then. Biggs wrote that “no voter ID will be required in the upcoming election cycle unless otherwise ordered by the Court.”
The lawsuit was filed last year by the North Carolina NAACP against state government leaders including Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and the members of the State Board of Elections. Cooper has opposed voter ID in the past, however — he vetoed the law, unsuccessfully, when the legislature passed it in a lame-duck session in December 2018 — and Republican lawmakers have said they’re concerned about the law being rigorously defended by the state, since they’re not part of the lawsuit.
Biggs announced last week that this decision would be coming soon. After she did so, N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, criticized her and called on Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein to appeal her decision.
“This last-ditch effort from an unelected judge to stymie the implementation of voter ID and prohibit the legislature from defending the law it wrote is inappropriate,” Berger said. “Legislative leaders have worked in good faith to accept numerous forms of IDs and allow for certain exclusions. The result is one of the most lenient voter ID laws in the nation.”
Lame duck supermajority
This isn’t the only lawsuit challenging voter ID; a case heard by the N.C. Court of Appeals in October challenges the constitutionality of the voter ID amendment passed in 2018 and another amendment capping the hypothetical future limit on income taxes.
Biggs wrote in her opinion that as to the details of how the law was written and passed, she considered them “procedurally unobjectionable.”
But it’s impossible to ignore, she said, the state’s history of politicians violating the rights of minorities for political gain since “race and party are inexorably linked” in North Carolina. In the 2016 elections, Biggs wrote, only 10% of black voters in North Carolina supported Republicans, whereas nearly two-thirds of white voters supported Republicans.
She pointed to the fact that the legislature passed this law in December of 2018. That was after Republicans lost their veto-proof supermajority in the 2018 elections, but before the new Democrats were sworn into office in January 2019. And that GOP supermajority, she wrote, existed in large part because of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
She also said that while the NAACP was wrong to call the new voter ID law a “barely disguised duplicate” of the unconstitutional 2013 voter ID law, it’s also impossible to ignore the fact that it was mostly the same politicians who voted for both laws. And even after learning that their initial attempt at voter ID was unconstitutional due to racial discrimination against black voters, Republican politicians were “intransigent” and did not waver in their attempts.
“... rather than trying to cleanse the discriminatory taint which had imbued (the 2013 law), the legislature sought ways to circumvent state and federal courts and further entrench itself,” she wrote.
Republicans pointed to the fact that one of the bill’s sponsors was Sen. Joel Ford, a black Democrat from Charlotte who is no longer in the legislature.
”It is absolutely ridiculous that the judge would accuse the bill sponsors – including an African American Democrat – of being racist,” Berger spokeswoman Lauren Horsch said in a news release Tuesday. “The voters saw the need for voter ID and approved the constitutional amendment.”
This story was originally published December 31, 2019 at 4:41 PM.
