Courts deal setbacks to GOP voting restrictions in 3 states

Besides eliminating voter ID requirements in North Carolina, Friday’s ruling erases provisions that prohibited same-day registration and out-of-precinct provisional voting, as well as those that restricted early voting.

The Richmond, Va.-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the measures violated the Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act by targeting black voters “with nearly surgical precision”.

As for the state of North Carolina, lawmakers and supporters have expressed their disapproval of the court’s decision. The 83-page decision got to the core of the matter regarding the state’s reasoning behind the enactment of the voter ID law, saying the North Carolina legislature, in passing the voter ID bill used “party politics” to undo any advances made in voting rights in the state.

But it’s not just the South. What it found was that African American voters in North Carolina were more likely to vote early, use same-day voter registration and straight-ticket voting. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a national leader in Republican voter restriction efforts, had pushed through a rule that would have set those votes aside, perhaps up to 50,000 by the November election.

The decisions followed a similar blow earlier this month to what critics said was one of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws in Texas.

However, it’s unlikely that the evenly divided and short-handed Supreme Court would take the case or block Friday’s ruling from governing elections this November, said election-law experts Ned Foley of Ohio State University and Richard Hasen of the University of California at Irvine.

The post GOP voting restrictions struck down in three states appeared first on PBS NewsHour. They presented evidence at trial attempting to show that Republicans were motivated to pass the laws to suppress Democratic turnout.

“The record makes clear that the historical origin of the challenged provisions in this statute is not the innocuous back-and-forth of routine partisan struggle that the State suggests and that the district court accepted”, Judge Diana Motz wrote on behalf of Judges James Wynn and Henry Floyd.

“Rather”, the judge continued, “the General Assembly enacted them in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting”.

Judge Schroeder, however, is not alone on the bench in his skepticism of racial intent in the voter ID movement. Those who lament this state’s vote ID law can only be disenfranchised due to their own apathy.

“The law required in-person voters to show certain photo IDs, beginning in 2016, which African Americans disproportionately lacked, and eliminated or reduced registration and voting access tools that African Americans disproportionately used”, the decision explains. A key concern was that white voters could be more likely to have those IDs. They add that such laws simply require voters to do what they have to do to board an airplane or to buy prescription medicine.

This is about as clear-cut an indictment of the discriminatory underpinnings of voter-ID laws as you’ll find anywhere.

“We can only wonder if the intent [of Friday’sruling] is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democrat politicians…to steal the election, ” North Carolina Senate President Phil Berger and House Speaker Tom Moore wrote in a joint statement.

Cooper is the Democratic state attorney general challenging McCrory for the governorship. “It’s not about anything else”.

Separately in another swing state, Wisconsin, a federal judge found that parts of a law concerned “with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement… particularly in minority communities”.