North Carolina’s Democrat-leaning Supreme Court has knocked down a voter ID law and a gerrymandered redistricting map both passed by Republican legislators, saying that they “target African-American voters who were unlikely to vote for Republican candidates.”
The two rulings, issued Friday, were decided in a 4-3 vote which fell along party lines. In January, the court will switch to a Republican majority as newly elected judges take their seats.
The state’s voter ID law required voters to submit one of several types of photo identification before being allowed to vote. Voters in the state approved of the law in a 2018 ballot measure, and Republican legislators passed the law that same year, overriding the veto of Gov. Roy Cooper (D).
“Competent evidence [shows] that the statute was motivated by a racially discriminatory purpose,” Justice Anita Earls wrote in the ruling, The Washington Post reported.
The court’s decision upheld a lower and an appeal courts’ previous rulings which said that the voter ID law “offers a political payoff” favoring Republicans and their traditionally white voters over predominantly Democratic Black voters.
“Although laws that limit African American political participation have frequently been race neutral on their face, they have ‘nevertheless had profoundly discriminatory effects,’” Earls wrote. “Thus, equal access to the ballot box remains a critical issue in North Carolina.”
Indeed, a 2017 study published in The Journal of Politics found that “strict identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in primaries and general elections.”
The court also ruled that Republicans intentionally redrew the state’s political districts to stop Democratic voters from electing Democratic lawmakers.
Justice Robin Hudson wrote, “[When a redistricting plan] systematically makes it harder for individuals of one political party to elect a governing majority than individuals of another party of equal size based upon that partisanship, it deprives a voter of his or her fundamental right to equal voting power.”