Chief Justice Offers Caution
The U.S. Supreme Court Monday morning refused a request by North Carolina Republicans to review their discriminatory voter ID law that a lower court had struck down. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had admonished Tar Heel State Republican lawmakers last year, saying they had set out to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.†The Appeals Court said lawmakers passed the voter ID legislation with “discriminatory intent.”
The 2013 voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation, reduced the number of early voting days, banned same-day registration and voting, and struck down the ability of 16 year olds to pre-register to vote.
Republican lawmakers in North Carolina, upon the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act immediately had set out to study how African-Americans voted, then designed a voter ID law around those patterns.Â
The New York Times, reporting last year on the 4th Circuit’s ruling, noted “the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state.
“This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV),” the judges wrote.
So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people. “With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans,” the judges wrote. “The bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess.”
The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina’s 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. “After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days,” the court found.
Most strikingly, the judges point to a “smoking gun” in North Carolina’s justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic,” and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.
It’s important to note that Chief Justice John Roberts, who was key to the Supreme Court’s decision to effectively neuter the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013, on Monday wrote that the decision to not review the North Carolina case should not be viewed as support or opposition of the North Carolina law itself, but rather about who represented the state itself. North Carolina voted out its Republican governor, who had signed the law into place, and while Republicans in the state legislature supported SCOTUS review, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper did not.
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