North Carolina court strikes down a voter ID law, citing racial discrimination
Checking voters’ identification cards in Asheville, NC, in 2016. Credit: George Etheredge,
The New York Times
By Michael Wines, for The New York Times, September 17, 2021
A North Carolina court struck down the state’s voter identification law on Friday, citing “persuasive evidence” that a Republican-dominated state legislature had rushed it to passage at least in part to make it harder for Black voters to cast ballots.
It was the second time in five years that a court had invalidated a North Carolina voter identification law as racially discriminatory. In 2016, a federal appeals court ruled against a different version of the law, saying it had targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”
The ruling on Friday, by a three-judge panel of the state Superior Court in Raleigh, effectively makes permanent a temporary ban on the law that a court had imposed after its passage in 2018.
In the 2-to-1 decision, the judges stated that they did not find that the Republican lawmakers who approved the law acted out of racial animus, but rather that they wanted to depress Black turnout because most African Americans cast ballots for Democrats.
That made no difference, the judges wrote, because the discriminatory effect is the same, even if done for partisan gain.
A dissenting judge argued that the court majority had relied on “mostly uncredible and incompetent evidence to find discriminatory intent.”
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which sued to block the law on behalf of five voters, said the ruling sent “a strong message that racial discrimination will not be tolerated.”
“Should legislative defendants appeal today’s ruling, we’ll be prepared to remind them of what this court and the state’s constitution mandate: every vote matters,” Allison Riggs, co-executive director of the group, said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear whether the legislature would appeal. Nor was it clear that the ruling would have any measurable impact on major elections, even in such a bitterly contested state. The North Carolina photo ID requirement was among the more lenient identification laws passed in recent years, and scholarly studies are divided over how much ID laws discourage people from casting ballots.
In an interview, Ms. Riggs said the coalition brought the suit in a state court instead of a federal one in part because provisions in the North Carolina Constitution are more protective of voting than those in the federal Constitution. Beyond that, the Superior Court ruling, should it be upheld, would not be reviewable by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has become increasingly hostile to voting-rights arguments in recent years.
A separate lawsuit contesting the photo identification law is moving slowly through the federal courts, but the decision on Friday could make it moot if it is upheld.
The law at issue was the latest in a decade-long effort by Republicans in the state General Assembly to require voters to display identification, a cause the national Republican Party had embraced as an anti-fraud measure even though studies have shown that fraud at polling places was extremely rare.
An ID law passed in 2011 was vetoed by the state’s Democratic governor, Beverly E. Perdue. A second version, passed in 2013 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the core of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, relied on state data to compile a list of required IDs that Black voters disproportionately lacked, and exclude those they often held.
After that law was invalidated in 2016, the Legislature proposed an amendment to the state Constitution requiring voters to display identification at the polls. And when voters approved the amendment in the 2018 general election, the legislature called a lame-duck session to enact legislation setting out specific photo ID requirements.
A legal advocacy group, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, sued on behalf of five voters to overturn the law. At a trial in April, lawyers for the Republican-controlled Legislature argued that the new law not only was far less strict than the one struck down by the federal court, but counted a Black Democratic legislator as a sponsor.
The 2018 law accepted as valid student and tribal identification cards that the 2013 law excluded, made free IDs available at driver’s license and election offices and permitted voters who still lacked a photo identification to cast a provisional ballot.
But lawyers for the Southern Coalition argued that none of that outweighed the state’s recent and proven history of racial discrimination aimed at voters. The Republican supermajority that enacted the ID law was later ruled to be the product of racial gerrymandering, they argued.
Moreover, they said, even if the photo identification law improved on its predecessor, it still had a lopsided impact on Black voters. Republicans rejected Democratic proposals to add public assistance and high-school ID cards to the list of accepted identification, they noted, and an expert witness testified that Black voters were about 39 percent more likely to lack an accepted ID than were white voters.
