What’s the Republican rush on voter ID?
The way Republicans are responding to the delay in imposing North Carolina’s new voter ID law, you would think there are thousands of impostors ready to illegally cast ballots in another person’s name in the 2020 elections.
We know that threat isn’t real. There’s almost no evidence of in-person voter fraud — an act that was a felony even before the the voter ID law — and there’s no reason to expect a surge of it in 2020. North Carolina officials combed through the 2016 election results in which Republican Gov. Pat McCrory lost narrowly to Democrat Roy Cooper. They found one case of in-person voter impersonation out of 4.8 million votes cast.
Nonetheless, Republicans called for an urgent response to overturn a federal judge’s order suspending the voter ID law while an NAACP lawsuit is pending. The lawsuit says the photo ID requirement will suppress votes by African Americans and others. The judge, Loretta Biggs, acted last week to head off a planned statewide mailing explaining the new requirement. She explained her concerns about the law in a 60-page order released Tuesday. The NAACP lawsuit will be decided by a trial in 2020.
Biggs’ action means voters likely will not have to present a photo ID during the March 2020 primaries. But Republican state lawmakers, whom the judge blocked from joining the suit since they are named in it, are urging state Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, to challenge the injunction. Attorneys representing the General Assembly’s Republican lawmakers said in a letter to Stein: “it is imperative that you seek a stay of Judge Biggs’s injunction immediately to avoid irreparable harm to the State.”
It’s hard to see what “irreparable harm” will come from waiting for a trial to determine whether North Carolina’s voter photo ID law is constitutional. And with this Republican legislative majority there’s good reason to think it may not be. The Republicans’ 2013 version of a voter photo ID law was part of a package of election law changes a federal appeals court found to be written with “discriminatory intent” to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Biggs said the new voter ID may also be rooted in bias. In her Tuesday filing she wrote that the law may be “motivated, at least in part, by racially discriminatory intent.”
Despite that record, legislative leaders are acting as if a judicial test of a law affecting the right to vote is improper.
Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and State House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) said in a joint statement: “This last-ditch effort from an unelected judge to stymie the implementation of voter ID and prohibit the legislature from defending the law it wrote is inappropriate. Legislative leaders have worked in good faith to accept numerous forms of IDs and allow for certain exclusions.”
That “good faith” effort was hardly voluntary. Republican lawmakers modified the law under the threat of another rejection by the courts. But even then they bent the law and the process. In 2018 55 percent of voters approved a state constitutional amendment requiring a photo ID for voting without seeing the details of the requirement. When Cooper vetoed the bill containing those details, Republicans used the last gasp of their gerrymandered supermajority to override the veto in December 2018.
If Republicans want a voter photo ID requirement that will be regarded as an honest safeguard rather than a partisan ploy, they should welcome a thorough legal test of the law. Instead they are in a rush to have it affect the 2020 elections, a haste that supports Judge Biggs’ concerns about the law’s real intent.
This story was originally published December 3, 2019 at 12:00 AM with the headline "What’s the Republican rush on voter ID?."