Voting Rights Victories In North Carolina, Wisconsin, And Kansas

The ruling in by an appeals court on Friday tossing out North Carolina's voter ID law is a huge win for voting rights and may help Democrats win that state in November's elections. That ruling was followed later in the day by another from Wisconsin that also ruled portions of that state's voter ID requirements unconstitutional. Wisconsin, like North Carolina, may also be a hotly contested state come the fall. And in Kansas, a county judge has issued an injunction preventing the state from setting up a dual voter registration program, one that complied with federal law and a much stricter version that would only apply to state elections.

The North Carolina ruling was particularly pointed, saying the law's provisions "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision." In fact, lawmakers requested data on voting behaviors based on race and then crafted the law to target the behaviors that were more likely to be used by African Americans. It invalidated IDs and early voting times that were predominantly used by African Americans and eliminated early voting periods when they were most likely to vote. "Thus, in what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise," the judges write in their decision."

Voter ID laws and other voting restrictions are basically the modern equivalent of a poll tax or literacy test that was used to restrict minority voters for decades. The entire idea is to make it as difficult as possible for various sectors of the electorate to vote. In this case in North Carolina, the clear racial discrimination used in creating the law might make the Supreme Court re-think their decision to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Perhaps that case might be re-heard if we ever get a ninth Supreme Court justice.