AP Photo Court strikes down North Carolina voter ID law

A federal appeals court has struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law, holding that it was “passed with racially discriminatory intent.”

The ruling also invalidated limits the same state law placed in 2013 on early voting, same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration.


The three judges assigned to the case — all Democratic appointees — were unanimous that the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature violated the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act three years ago by enacting the measure requiring voters to show certain types of photo ID at the polls.

"The record makes clear that the historical origin of the challenged provisions in this statute is not the innocuous back-and-forth of routine partisan struggle that the State suggests and that the district court accepted," Judge Diana Motz wrote on behalf of Judges James Wynn and Henry Floyd. "Rather, the General Assembly enacted them in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting. The district court clearly erred in ignoring or dismissing this historical background evidence, all of which supports a finding of discriminatory intent."

The court's opinion bluntly described the legislation as a clear effort to suppress the black vote.

"We cannot ignore the record evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history," Motz added.

The state could seek to appeal the decision to the full bench of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals or to the Supreme Court, but it seems unlikely those courts will step in to restore the voter ID law and other voting-related changes in advance of the November election.

While the appeals court panel was unanimous on the motivations behind the law, Motz dissented in part from the remedy the appeals court ordered. She noted that the state loosened the photo-ID requirement a bit in 2015 by allowing voters without acceptable ID to vote if they signed an affidavit saying they had a "reasonable impediment" to getting one.

Motz — an appointee of President Bill Clinton — said that rather rather than a permanent injunction against the law, she would have imposed a temporary ban on the photo ID requirement.

However, Wynn and Floyd — both appointees of President Barack Obama — said the discriminatory intent of the 2013 version tainted the photo-ID requirement even as modified and they ordered the district court to block the measure permanently.

"Nothing in this record shows that the reasonable impediment exception ensures that the photo ID law no longer imposes any lingering burden on African American voters," Wynn wrote.

A spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling and the state's likely next steps.

The Obama Administration was among those urging the appeals court to invalidate the North Carolina law.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch hailed the ruling Friday, pointing to its description of the law as "one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history."

"This law was passed with discriminatory intent. It targeted African-Americans 'with almost surgical precision' – imposing stringent ID requirements, reducing same-day registration and constraining out-of-precinct voting to place barriers between citizens and the ballot box. And it sent a message that contradicted some of the most basic principles of our democracy," Lynch said in a statement. "The ability of Americans to have a voice in the direction of their country – to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation – is fundamental to who we are and who we aspire to be."

The 4th Circuit ruling also delivered a harsh rebuke to U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder, who issued a mammoth, 485-page decision in April upholding the law. Motz suggested Schroeder had ample evidence of racial bias in front of him, but failed to put the pieces together.

"The district court clearly erred" when it found a lack of discriminatory intent and when it deemed North Carolina's interests in passing the law to be compelling, she wrote. "This error resulted from the court’s consideration of each piece of evidence in a vacuum, rather than engaging in the totality of the circumstances analysis required....Any individual piece of evidence can seem innocuous when viewed alone, but gains an entirely different meaning when considered in context."