Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Supreme Court won’t reinstate restrictive North Carolina voter law
Court lets stand decision quashing N.C. restrictions
Justices allow lower court’s ruling quashing changes to early voting, ID rules.
WASHINGTON — In a victory for voting rights advocates, the Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from North Carolina’s Republican leaders and let stand a decision that struck down their 2013 law that added new restrictions on voting.
The 4th Circuit Court had branded the law as racially biased and said North Carolina lawmakers had targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.”
North Carolina lawmakers took action immediately after the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote had voided part of the historic Voting Rights Act that required some states, including North Carolina, to get federal approval before altering their voting laws.
The new North Carolina measure made five changes, including restricting early voting, which had been used more often by AfricanAmericans, and by requiring registered voters to show one of several photo IDs at the polls. The appeals court noted the state had chosen the types of IDs that were less likely to be held by African-Americans.
Then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, slammed the decision and lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court. Last year, four of the high court’s conservative justices had signaled they were prepared to block the lower court ruling and revive the law. They then lacked a fifth vote due to the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
But the situation changed in November when the state’s voters ousted McCrory and narrowly elected Democrat Roy Cooper. And he and the state’s attorney general, also a Democrat, recently told the high court they did not wish to appeal the lower court’s ruling.
At the same time, the GOP-controlled Legislature said it did wish to have the appeal heard.
With the recent addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch, conservatives presumably would have had the votes this time to reinstate the North Carolina law.
But after considering the issue for several weeks, the Supreme Court announced Monday it would not hear the case.
As is its custom, the justices did not give a reason for declining to review the lower court’s decision. But in an accompanying statement, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. noted the particular circumstances of the appeal, in which the Republican legislative leadership attempted to continue the appeal and the Democratic governor and attorney general sought to abandon it.
“Given the blizzard of filings over who is and who is not authorized to seek review in this court under North Carolina law, it is important to recall our frequent admonition that the ‘denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case,’ ” Roberts said.
The court’s action sets no legal precedent, but it likely ends the litigation over the North Carolina law.
Voting rights advocates hailed the demise of the law.
“An ugly chapter in voter suppression is finally closing,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.
“We are grateful that the Supreme Court has decided to allow the 4th Circuit’s ruling to stand, confirming that discrimination has no place in our democracy and elections,” said Allison Riggs, senior staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “This ruling sends a strong message that lawmakers in North Carolina should stop enacting laws that discriminate based on race.”
In a statement issued after the Supreme Court acted, Cooper said, “We need to be making it easier to vote, not harder — and the court found this law sought to discriminate against African-American voters with ‘surgical precision,’ I will continue to work to protect the right of every legal, registered North Carolinian to participate in our democratic process.”
The battle against the law, considered one of the nation’s most far-reaching, consumed years of litigation by the Obama administration and a wide coalition of civil rights organizations.
The Rev. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, the lead organizational plaintiff in the case, said, “Today we experience a victory for justice that is unimaginably important for African Americans, Latinos, all North Carolinians, and the nation.”
The legislature’s top Republicans, House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger, said in a statement that they would enact a new voter-identification law.
“It is unconscionable that Roy Cooper and (new Democratic Attorney General) Josh Stein —who ignored state law and flouted their conflicts of interest to kill voter ID in North Carolina — have now caused the vast majority of voters who support voter ID to be denied their day in court,” Moore and Berger said in a statement. “In light of Chief Justice Roberts’ statement that the ruling was not based on the merits of voter ID, all North Carolinians can rest assured that Republican legislators will continue fighting to protect the integrity of our elections by implementing the commonsense requirement to show a photo ID when we vote.”
The Supreme Court will soon rule on a case about whether the state’s congressional districts were racially gerrymandered, as a lower court found. And federal judges have also said the state must redraw state legislative districts for the same reason. That decision is being appealed.