Federal trial in NC voting rights case scheduled to begin

Litigation over changes in voting rules, as opposed to the redrawing of voting districts, was uncommon before the Supreme Court blocked the federal preapproval requirement in Shelby County v. Holder; questionable changes were usually halted before they could take effect.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) – A voting rights trial stemming from three federal lawsuits challenging provisions of a 2013 North Carolina law is getting under way. “The people of North Carolina are standing up – in the courts and the streets – because we refuse to accept the revival of Jim Crow tactics used to block access to the ballot for African-American and Latino voters”.

“If we fight back against voter suppression, the new demographic can shift the politics of the South from the old southern strategy to a more progressive South and that would be good for America and good for the world”, he says. In 2012, for example, 70 percent of all African Americans in North Carolina used early voting, compared to 56 percent of the overall voting population.

But North Carolina lawmakers passed the broadest set of changes, trimming or eliminating measures that had been adopted over the previous 15 years expressly to bolster electoral participation by minority and younger voters.

The trial will not settle the challenge against voter ID.

Brook says this case “will go a long way to deciding whether measures along these lines are going to be upheld in other portions of the nation”.

What the case means for the rest of the country is actually a key part of the state’s defense of the law, too. They “fall with special force on North Carolina’s black citizens”, the Justice Department said in its brief, and “that unlawful result is no accident”.

“If the court would order North Carolina to count out-of-precinct ballots, you have the same history of discrimination, unfortunately, and you have the same socioeconomic conditions in South Carolina”, Farr told the judges. The state’s lawyers point out Virginia doesn’t have any early voting, and yet it, too, experienced surges in African-American turnout the past two presidential elections. Farr asked if similar increases in North Carolina say more about the Obama campaign than voting policies.

“How can there be unequal opportunity when all voters have the right to register 25 days before the election?” he said. The law instituted a voter-ID requirement, shortened early voting by a week, got rid of same-day registration, expanded the state’s ability to challenge voters, killed a preregistration program for 16- and 17-year-olds, and disallowed the counting of provisional ballots cast out-of-precinct, among other changes. “The statute itself is facially neutral”. For now, proceedings related to that issue have been deferred and will not be a part of this federal trial. North Carolina lawmakers watered down the ID requirement last month, and the judge is giving attorneys more time to sort out how that affects their case.