North Carolina’s voter identification law, which has been described as the most sweeping attack on African American electoral rights since the Jim Crow era, is being challenged in a legal hearing that opens on Monday.



Civil rights lawyers and activists are gathering in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the start of the legal challenge that is expected to last all week. They will be seeking to persuade a federal district judge to impose a preliminary injunction against key aspects of HB 589, the voting law enacted by state Republicans last August.

Lawyers for the North Carolina branch of the NAACP and the civil rights group the Advancement Project will argue that the main pillars of the law should be temporarily halted ahead of a full trial next year. Otherwise, they say, tens of thousands of largely poor black voters could find themselves turned away at the polls at the midterm elections in November.

“This is the worst voter suppression law we have seen since the days of Jim Crow. It is a full-on assault on the voting rights of minorities,” said Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina state conference of the NAACP.

North Carolina was the first state to take advantage of the landmark US supreme court ruling last June that removed one of the most powerful provisions in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v Holder, the supreme court struck down the so-called “pre-clearance requirement” that had for almost half a century acted as a stalwart against racial discrimination at the polls in largely Southern states.

The provision had required that nine entire states and parts of six others including North Carolina sought approval from the federal government, or “pre-cleared”, any changes they made to voting arrangements. The conservative majority of the supreme court argued that exceptional remedies that had been necessary in the 1960s to combat Jim Crow racism were no longer justified in the modern age.

African American college students protested at a whites-only lunch counter during the peaceful protests in the 1960s, North Carolina. Photograph: John G Moebes/Jack Moebes/Corbis Photograph: John G. Moebes/ Jack Moebes/CORBIS

Republican-controlled states that were released under Shelby from federal oversight moved swiftly to take advantage of their new freedoms. The first state to legislate was North Carolina: governor Pat McCrory signed HB 589 into law barely a month after the US supreme court issued its ruling.

Terms of North Carolina's new law

HB 589 reins back on changes to voting arrangements that have encouraged greater participation, particularly by black and other ethnic minority groups, in a number of ways:

• Photo ID. HB 589 requires most voters to show photo identification cards at the polls before they can cast their ballot. The type of card accepted is highly restricted, making it difficult for older people, particularly African Americans, without access to birth certificates or driving licences to vote. This provision will come into effect in the 2016 presidential election. But under the law, voters at the midterm elections this November will be asked to stipulate whether they have ID, an inquiry that civil rights advocates fear could alone dissuade many people from turning out on election day.

• Same-day registration. The act eliminates the ability of individuals to register to vote on the day of election. In five out of the past six federal elections, African American voters have used SDR at proportionately much higher rates than whites – in the 2012 presidential election black voters made up less than a quarter of the whole electorate but 41% of voters who registered on the day.

• Early voting. HB 589 cuts the number of early voting days from 17 to 10. In 2012, seven out of 10 African Americans who voted did so early – a rate 140% higher than that for white voters.

• Out-of-precinct ballots. The legislation forces ballots to be discarded where they have been cast outside an individual’s precinct. Black voters are more than twice as likely to cast out-of-precinct ballots than whites, partly because they are less likely to own a car and have greater difficulty travelling to poll stations.

• Elimination of pre-registration. In previous elections, civil rights groups held drives to pre-register 16- and 17-year-olds so that they would automatically be registered to vote when they turned 18. The drives were particularly successful in encouraging young ethnic minority teenagers to vote. HB 589 prohibits the practice.

Voter fraud or racial suppression

The Republican sponsors of the legislation argue that it is designed to avoid fraudulent voting and to reduce the cost of elections. They say the changes will be neutral in their impact, and will have no detrimental effect on any particular group of voters.

But civil rights campaigners see the act as a rolling back on measures that have been introduced over the past few decades that have greatly increased voter participation. In 1992, North Carolina ranked 46th out of 50 in the state league table for voter participation, but it has risen steadily, from 37th in 2000 to 11th in 2012.

The surge in voting was particularly notable for black voters who, energised by the chance to elect a black president, took full advantage of new, more convenient polling arrangements and turned out in historic numbers in both the 2008 and 2012 elections. Black voter participation snowballed from 42% in 2000 to 69% in 2012, with those casting their ballots overwhelmingly backing Barack Obama.

The attempt by the Republican-dominated general assembly in North Carolina to tighten voting channels is especially worrying for older black residents who lived through the blatant discrimination of the Jim Crow laws. Like many southern states, North Carolina introduced hurdles to voting in the early 20th century specifically targeted at African Americans, including a poll tax and literacy tests.

A Confederate flag on display at the old capitol in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photograph: Michael Biesecker/AP Photograph: Michael Biesecker/AP

The poll tax was scrapped in 1920. But as the US supreme court itself has noted, the literacy test, which required black voters to read and write the US constitution before they could participate in the democratic process, lived on in some parts of the state until 1970.

Rosanell Eaton, the lead plaintiff in this week’s legal challenge to HB 589, was born in 1921 and remembers the literacy test. This year, she faces losing her right to vote under the new act because the name on her birth certificate doesn’t tally with that on her driving licence.

“I can’t imagine that I have to go through the same thing I had to go through 75 years ago,” she said in a recent interview with Al Sharpton on MSNBC. “It is so horrible to think about going back where we came from.”

Barber said that the threat of Eaton being unable to cast her vote this November was an indication of what southern legislators were prepared to do following the Shelby ruling. “This isn’t Republicanism, this is extremism. This is the model. When you look at North Carolina, you are looking at what extremists want to do to suppress voting.”