When Sandra Beatty goes somewhere and does something, it’s because she really wants to – five years after losing her vision and both her feet to diabetes, any errand is an ordeal. So when on 31 October, with the help of her 31-year-old daughter, she got out of her first-floor apartment, and climbed into the passenger seat of her friend’s Chevrolet Tahoe, it was because she planned to do one of what she considers her most important tasks: going to vote.

It was not until weeks later, when Beatty got a call from the nonprofit Southern Coalition for Social Justice that she learned her ballot had been thrown out.

“It hurt. It hurt because I thought I was doing something. I – I thought I was making some kind of progress and doing something. And it didn’t count,” Beatty said.

Beatty made that statement in a deposition videotaped in May. It is one of several testimonies included in a lawsuit with national voting rights implications, brought by several voting rights groups and the federal Justice Department against North Carolina’s governor and electoral officials.

In the trial, which began on Monday, the plaintiffs argue that the 2013 voting law revisions “unduly burden the right to vote and discriminate against African American voters”, in violation of the constitution and the landmark civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is participating in the suit.

The vote that didn’t count

When Beatty and her companions went to the polls in October four days before the election, they were, like more than a million voters in North Carolina – a disproportionate number of them African American – taking advantage of a 10-day early voting period, in which they could go to one of a handful of public buildings picked out for the purpose and submit their ballots ahead of time.

That the option existed at all was the result of what had been a slow expansion of voting access in the state over the last hundred years. Then, in 2013, that trend seemed to reverse itself, when North Carolina’s newly Republican-controlled legislature and Republican governor, Pat McCrory, enacted a new law placing a set of new restrictions on voting.

One of those restrictions had been to eliminate a week of early voting, cutting down what had previously been a 17-day period. Beatty was about to learn about another of its restrictions the hard way.

The 51-year-old former call center manager had moved three years before from Yonkers, outside New York City, to live with her children in North Carolina, take advantage of a first-floor apartment and enjoy the relative peace and quiet. She had not yet switched her voting registration over to her new state. This was no problem, the volunteers at the county office building hosting early voting assured her – she could register right then and there. With her daughter’s help, she filled out the paperwork, then her ballot.

A year before, that would have been true. But what apparently no one there knew was that, in the same voting law, the state had also taken away same-day voter registration.

Voting rights demonstrators fill the streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, last Monday. Photograph: Chuck Burton/AP

The North Carolina state legislature passed that law one month after the US supreme court, in its ruling on Shelby County v Holder, struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Until that moment, North Carolina and 14 other states, mostly in the south, had been required to obtain prior federal approval before making changes to their voting laws. The requirement, known as “preclearance”, had been part of an effort aimed at overturning a century of white supremacy protected by laws making it difficult, if not functionally illegal, for black people – who in some of those states had initially made up a majority of the population – to vote.

Beatty’s family has lived that history: her mother was born outside Birmingham, Alabama, and her father in New Orleans; they ultimately met in New York, where he was working as a janitor. She recalled her mother, grandmother and aunt telling stories of how hard it had been for them to vote as both blacks and women.

But in the supreme court’s 2013 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that preclearance was no longer necessary. “The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions,” he wrote.

Beatty worries now that the progress her family fought for could be undone.

“I hope that, my deposition, they read it through,” Beatty told the Guardian after the trial began. “And I hope it works out that we have the same-day registration because it makes such a big difference. I think they would have more voters.” (Her registration was ultimately accepted, according to state records, meaning she will be eligible to vote in future elections.)

A tradition of racial exclusion

Some are now looking to the North Carolina case as a precedent, to see what kind of new post-Shelby County voting laws might hold up in court.

It has never been clear exactly why North Carolina officials implemented the new restrictions in the first place. Theirs was one of several laws passed by states at the time requiring voters to produce photo IDs at the polls. That provision, however, was not set to take effect in North Carolina until 2016 – and it has since been weakened to allow voters without IDs to vote if they sign an affidavit explaining why they could not get an ID in time.

Another key provision of the law, being challenged in the current lawsuit, includes rejecting ballots cast away from a voter’s home precinct.

During debates, several lawmakers cited a need to prevent fraud in elections; after signing the bill into law, Governor McCory condemned its critics on what he called the “extreme left”, saying that they were “more interested in divisive politics than ensuring that no one’s vote is disenfranchised by fraudulent ballots”.

But the then North Carolina house of representatives speaker, Thom Tillis, denied that preventing fraud was the primary reason for the law, saying instead at the time that it responded to a vaguer popular demand to “restore confidence” in elections.



Republican Thom Tillis was campaigning for a US Senate seat from North Carolina at the time the voting law was passed last year. He won. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Indeed, data available at the time showed that voter fraud was extremely uncommon in the state’s elections. Tillis was on the ballot in 2014 running for a US Senate seat. He won despite trailing in the last-minute polls.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that the new restrictions were intentionally designed to make it more difficult for poorer and working-class people, and those with less education, to participate in elections. “Same-day registration and early voting are particularly helpful for voters who have, say, recently moved and who work nine-to-five jobs where they can’t take time off work on election day,” said Dale Ho, an ACLU lawyer working on the case. “In North Carolina those voters are disproportionately African American.”

For instance, the ACLU says, more than 70% of African American voters used early voting during the 2008 and 2012 general elections.

Morgan Kousser, a historian of voting rights at the California Institute of Technology, testified at the trial that the new North Carolina law continued an older tradition of racial exclusion. “The North Carolina legislature chose a qualification or a rule which was disproportionately used by blacks, and they repealed that rule,” he said.

Joshua Lawson, a spokesman for the North Carolina state board of elections, rejected that characterization. “The state board of elections is a bipartisan, independent agency committed to administering the laws in a manner that honors rights guaranteed under the federal and state constitutions,” Lawson said.

Lawyers representing North Carolina electoral officials and McCrory’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, which include the League of Women Voters and the North Carolina NAACP, plan on using a variety of witnesses – white, black and Hispanic – to make the case that the new voting laws are unfair.

Hispanic and younger voters also disproportionately utilize the now-restricted voting methods. Along with African Americans, they also disproportionately vote for Democrats – in the 2014 election in question at the trial, Tillis rode to victory on support from two-thirds of the white vote despite winning the backing of just 4% of African Americans.

Among the others who took the stand this week in the Raleigh federal courtroom was Dale Hicks, a marine corps veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012. Hicks, who is African American, testified that he was not allowed to vote in 2014 because he had not switched his registration from Camp Lejeune, where he had been stationed, to his new home in Raleigh. Unable to reregister the same day, he filled out a provisional ballot that was ultimately discarded.

“I know the history of this country and world history, and I know that participation is very important to prevent atrocities from occurring and participation is very important to make our democracy work,” he told the court. “So, yes, voting is very important to me.”