North Carolina Judges Strike Down Voter ID Law, Claiming It’s Racist, by Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times, September 19, 2021
Two North Carolina judges on Sept. 17 struck down a law that required photo identification to vote, saying the measure “was enacted with the unconstitutional intent to discriminate against African American voters.”
The law was enacted in violation of the equal protection clause in North Carolina’s Constitution, the majority of the panel said. The clause says that “no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws; nor shall any person be subjected to discrimination by the State because of race, color, religion, or national origin.”
Defendants in a lawsuit, including North Carolina House Speaker Timothy Moore, failed to show that racial discrimination wasn’t a substantial or motivating factor behind the enactment of the law, Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr., both Democrats, wrote in a 102-page ruling permanently blocking the measure.
“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence,” they said.
The law in question, Senate Bill 824, was enacted after a majority of voters in North Carolina approved it as a constitutional amendment in 2018. Before that, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed the bill and overrode a veto from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
According to previous court rulings, plaintiffs challenging a law in the state must show that discrimination was a “motivating factor” in passing a law, the pair of judges said in their majority decision. That puts the burden on defendants to prove that the law “would have been enacted without this factor,” they said, quoting from a North Carolina Court of Appeals ruling from last year, Holmes v. Moore.
Jabari Holmes and five other voters in the state sued over the law on the same day the legislature overrode Cooper’s veto, noting that a previous voter identification requirement was invalidated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit because it was alleged to be intentionally racially discriminatory, in a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The bill “unconstitutionally and unjustifiably burdens the right to vote of Plaintiffs and similarly situated registered, qualified North Carolina voters who lack acceptable photo ID when they go to the polls and are subject to a complex process to vote,” the group of voters said in their complaint.