Voter ID case pits Democratic politicians against NAACP, as state leaders will appeal
The question of voter ID in North Carolina for the November 2020 elections remains unsettled, as Attorney General Josh Stein announced Thursday he will appeal a judge’s ruling blocking the state law requiring ID from going into effect.
However, it appears that no matter how the legal fight unfolds, voter ID won’t be required during the state’s primary elections.
Stein said in a news release that he would not request that ID be put back in place for the primary, “to avoid any further voter confusion.” Although Election Day for the primary isn’t until March, absentee voting starts in less than two weeks.
His decision follows a high-profile win by the North Carolina NAACP, which successfully argued to a federal judge that the 2018 voter ID law appeared to be motivated at least partially by racial discrimination.
“North Carolina has a sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression stretching back to the time of slavery, through the era of Jim Crow, and, crucially, continuing up to the present day,” wrote Loretta Biggs, a federal judge in North Carolina’s middle district, when she issued her ruling against the voter ID law on Tuesday.
History of voter ID in NC
This was the second attempt at implementing voter ID by North Carolina Republicans in recent years. Their previous attempt, in 2013, was ruled unconstitutional after a federal appeals court found that it was intended to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
And while the 2018 law didn’t contain some of the objectionable parts of the unconstitutional 2013 law — such as early voting restrictions that were unrelated to the ID issue — Biggs wrote that the new 2018 law still appears to have been “impermissibly motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent.”
Her decision doesn’t put a final end to the issue, regardless of how the state’s appeal goes, because it’s a temporary injunction. In other words, it’s only meant to halt the law from going into effect until a full trial can be held to decide the issue more permanently.
Republicans wrote the law, but they weren’t part of this lawsuit, in which the NAACP sued Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and the Democratic-majority N.C. State Board of Elections. Republicans have since repeatedly pressured Stein, a Democrat, to appeal the judge’s decision on the state’s behalf.
In a previous filing on behalf of Cooper and the elections board, Stein’s office wrote that “an injunction would contravene the will of NC voters, who ratified the constitutional requirement for voter ID in the 2018 statewide election.”
Republicans suggested amending the state constitution to include a voter ID provision, and voters approved the idea in the 2018 elections with about 55% approval. But the amendment itself contained no details about what a voter ID law would entail.
After it passed, the legislature came back to Raleigh and — in one of the final votes before Republicans lost their veto-proof supermajority — wrote the voter ID law now under fire, and passed it by overriding a veto from Cooper.
When he vetoed the law, Cooper called voter ID “a solution in search of problem” that lawmakers “designed to suppress the rights of minority, poor and elderly voters.”
Cooper and Stein in 2016 voter ID lawsuit
The last voter ID lawsuit took several years; the 2013 law wasn’t struck down until 2016. At that time, Cooper was the attorney general and engaged in a hotly contested election for the governor’s office with former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.
Cooper, as attorney general, had worked on behalf of Republican state leaders for a time in that case. But in August 2016, with the election heating up, a court ruled the law unconstitutional and Cooper said he wouldn’t appeal the decision.
“The courts keep striking down these laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor,” Cooper told reporters at the time, The News & Observer reported. “When are they going to learn that you just can’t run roughshod over the Constitution? That you have to pass laws that are within the framework of the state and federal constitutions? We need to start doing that in North Carolina.”
Republicans then appealed the case on their own, without the AG’s office, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take it up.
But the justices hadn’t made their decision by the time Cooper defeated McCrory in the 2016 elections, when Stein also won the race to replace Cooper as AG. In early 2017, Cooper and Stein withdrew the state’s request to appeal to the Supreme Court.
That cemented the ruling against the 2013 law and set up the eventual push for the constitutional amendment in 2018, which is now embroiled in yet another election-year fight.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published January 2, 2020 at 5:16 PM with the headline "Voter ID case pits Democratic politicians against NAACP, as state leaders will appeal."
