Fed appeals court strikes down NC’s voter ID law

A United States appeals court has overturned a controversial North Carolina law that requires voters to show identification before casting their ballots.

In its ruling, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit said the state legislature targeted African-Americans “with nearly surgical precision”. “Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the district court to the contrary and remand with instructions to enjoin the challenged provisions of the law”. The finding of discriminatory intent is key because it could ultimately serve as future grounds for placing North Carolina back under the Department of Justice’s “preclearance” regime for 10 years.

Seventeen states have new voting procedures in place for the November election, more than half of which are being challenged in court.

The ruling states that the law was enacted with discriminatory intent, citing statistics that black voters were disenfranchised by the law, being more likely to lack the proper identification required by the law.

The Virginia-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”. While the judges were unanimous on the motivations behind the law, Motz dissented in part from the remedy the appeals court ordered.

“This ruling is a stinging rebuke of the state’s attempt to undermine African-American voter participation, which had surged over the last decade”, Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices” – then, data in hand, “enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans”.

The three-judge panel ruled the Republican-backed law was meant to discriminate against black voters. However, those who support the identification restrictions – typically Republicans – say they’re really just trying to prevent voter fraud.

The law was originally upheld by a district court judge and North Carolina argued in court papers that the plaintiffs failed to prove the law was an “unconstitutional burden on any voters, much less African American Voters”. Motz was appointed by Bill Clinton, while the other two judges on the panel, James Wynn Jr. and Henry Floyd, are Obama appointees. The state is “almost certain” to appeal to the full court or to the U.S. Supreme Court, NPR’s Pam Fessler reports. “When a legislature dominated by one party has dismantled barriers to African American access to the franchise, even if done to gain votes, “politics as usual” does not allow a legislature dominated by the other party to re-erect those barriers”. But any reversal of today’s decision is unlikely to occur before the elections in November.