Court examines North Carolina’s new law that requires photo IDs for voting
By Ann E. Marimow
September 11, 2020 at 12:15 p.m. EDT
A federal appeals court on Friday struggled with how to weigh North Carolina’s history of discriminatory voting restrictions while examining the state’s latest election law that requires voters to present photo identification before casting ballots.
The new photo ID provision has been blocked by federal and state judges, and will not apply in the November election. Officials in the swing state began mailing absentee ballots last week.
Ahead of oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) urged the judges to prevent the measure, known as S.B. 824, from taking effect over objections from Republican legislative leaders.
“Lifting the injunction now would be disastrous,” lawyers for the governor told the judges in court filings. “The brunt would be borne by the same voters whom S.B. 824 targeted for disenfranchisement in the first place: minority voters who are both least likely to possess photo IDs that satisfy S.B. 824 and most vulnerable to COVID-19.”
The photo ID requirement is the latest in a series of North Carolina election measures scrutinized in court. The law was passed after the 4th Circuit struck down a separate set of voting rules that the court said in 2016 deliberately undercut the political power of Black voters and “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The three judges hearing the case — Pamela Harris, Julius N. Richardson and A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. — asked lawyers on both sides how they should account for the state’s political past when considering the current law.
“I understand that we can’t just ignore that. At the same time,” said Harris, a nominee of President Barack Obama, “the fact that a legislature passes one voter law with a discriminatory intent doesn’t forever disable a legislature from passing a voter ID law.” And she said, “this one is better. It has these ameliorative features that the prior law didn’t have.”
Lawyers representing the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP told the court that the state’s “unprecedented recent history of racially discriminatory election laws casts a long shadow” over the new requirement.
“This Court cannot shut its eyes to this sordid history” of barriers to voting, according to the NAACP, represented in court by John C. Ulin.
The state board of elections and Republican legislative leaders defended the requirement, telling the court that the provision does not discriminate. The law “is a state-of-the-art voter ID law that seeks to secure the State’s elections and bolster voter confidence while at the same time ensuring that all registered voters are able to cast a vote that will count, with or without ID,” attorney David H. Thompson wrote on behalf of Senate President Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).
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Olga Vysotskaya de Brito, the lawyer for the state board, said North Carolina’s law is “lenient” compared with other similar laws upheld by courts in Texas, Virginia and South Carolina.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/court-to-examine-north-carolinas-new-law-that-requires-photo-ids-for-voting/2020/09/10/1a2608b2-f366-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_northcarolina-1210p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
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