President Donald Trump did not rise to power alone — measures like the numerous Republican-led voter suppression efforts across the country helped propel him into office. Now, a federal court has blocked one such effort. This week, a court revealed their intent to halt implementation of a new requirement for photo identification when voting in North Carolina. That requirement — which is far from a new idea — can easily keep low income and marginalized community members from being able to vote at all.
North Carolina NAACP chapter President, the Rev. T. Anthony Spearman, explained that his group is “overjoyed that the federal court will intervene to halt this illegal photo ID law” and called the court’s ruling a “long fought for victory against voter suppression and for equal access to the ballot in this state.”
He added:
‘Once again, we’re battling for the soul of our democracy as a nation. And in this state, it is incumbent upon us to ensure that the right to vote is fair and free from racial discrimination.’
That suppression, he noted, has targeted African American and Latino voters, and he’s supported in that assertion by a previous federal court ruling. In 2016, a federal appeals court overturned legislation imposing a photo ID requirement in the state, insisting that the demands “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”
The NAACP helped lead the legal battle against the new incarnation of the photo ID requirement after voters approved the requirement on the ballot in 2018 with an about 55 percent majority ending up in favor of the provision. That is, of course, hardly an overwhelming majority, although the state Republican Party’s communications director Jeff Hauser claimed that the new ruling “will invalidate the votes of millions of North Carolinians who voted overwhelmingly to implement voter ID and strengthen the integrity of N.C. elections.” To be clear, there’s no evidence of any kind of real in-person voter fraud problem like photo IDs are supposed to address.
Back down in reality, following the ballot measure’s passage, Republicans in the state legislature passed their own new legislation guiding the requirement’s implementation, and the state’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed that implementation legislation — but state legislature Republicans had enough votes to overturn the veto and set the requirement to go into effect for the 2020 elections. Now, the decision whether or not to appeal the federal court ruling against the new requirement is in the hands of the state’s Attorney General Josh Stein — who is a Democrat. The actual ruling from the court will be released next week, and Stein’s office says he’ll formulate what to do next at that time. The early notice of the incoming ruling was delivered because the state was already printing millions of informational documents outlining the requirement — some of which were already sent out.
This is not the first recent debacle in which North Carolina voter suppression efforts have been thwarted. A federal court also recently upheld a new Congressional district map that replaced an old one that had been designed to dilute the votes of marginalized communities. Democrats are already expected to pick up two more seats.
