North Carolina college on lockdown after person displays gun

The first witnesses in a federal trial over North Carolina’s new photo identification requirement to vote have appeared in recorded depositions discussing their personal challenges to obtain a qualifying ID card. Schroeder held a three-week trial last summer on the rest of the election law, which reduces the number of days of early voting, disallows people from registering and voting on the same day, stops ballots cast in the wrong precinct from being counted, and ends the practice of pre-registering teenagers before they turn 18. Proponents of the measures say they are meant to prevent voter fraud. In an attempt to soften the court ahead of the trial, the state made some last-minute changes to the law-adding a provision for people who are unable to obtain the ID due to a narrow set of “reasonable impediments”.

Before a 2013 Supreme Court decision, North Carolina would not have been able to enact the voting changes without the approval of the Justice Department or a federal court.

Chris Keane/ReutersFlyers informing voters of the new voter ID law that will go into effect for the 2016 election are seen at the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina November 3, 2014.

The U.S. Justice Department and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People argue North Carolina’s revised voting protocol disproportionately burdens African-Americans and Hispanics, who are more likely than whites to lack the acceptable forms of identification. “What happened in North Carolina and other states immediately after Shelby is an indication of how wrongly decided that case was”, former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a recent interview.

Democrats argue voter ID laws passed by Republican-led state legislatures target voters who typically support the Democratic party.

Thomas Farr, an attorney hired by legislative leaders to help defend the law, said there’s no evidence of intentional discrimination and that upcoming evidence from a plaintiff’s expert still would show 94 percent of black registered voters already have a qualifying ID. Singleton says it’s not clear whether that person is a student.