WaPo: “A panel of North Carolina judges on Friday struck down the state’s law requiring voters to present photo identification before casting ballots, saying that the measure “was enacted in part for a discriminatory purpose” against African American voters.
The ruling is the latest development in a state battle over voting rights that has drawn national attention, and it comes amid a raft of new restrictions by GOP-led state legislatures across the country, as well as an effort in Congress to restore key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The North Carolina measure, known as S.B. 824, was enacted in December 2018 after a supermajority of the state legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper (D). North Carolina voters also approved a ballot measure creating a constitutional requirement that voters present a photo ID. At the time, Cooper said the law would disenfranchise minority voters, who are less likely to possess the required identification.
In Friday’s majority decision, Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr. wrote that the attorneys defending the law failed to prove that it “would have been enacted in its present form if it did not tend to discriminate against African American voters.”
“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence,” the judges wrote.
They noted that they did not find that any individual lawmaker supporting the voter-ID law “harbors any racial animus or hatred towards African American voters,” but rather that the legislature’s Republican majority targeted those voters because they were more likely to be Democrats.”