Thread: "Anglo" Muslim sues Ventura Sheriff over Hijab Removal

Judy wrote:

The US Supreme Court ruled the voter photo ID in North Carolina where MW's avatar says he lives unconstitutional.

Not true! The U.S. Supreme Court did not rule the North Carolina voter photo ID law unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. It was a federal appeals court that ruled the law unconstitutional, that's after it was first ruled constitutional by a lesser court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a statement that accompanied the court’s one-sentence order. He added that nothing should be read into the court’s decision to decline to hear the case.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/u...-carolina.html

You need to pay more attention to detail. You do know there are states with photo voter ID laws, don't you? So photo voter ID laws are not in violation of the laws of our land as you say. It would behoove you to do a better job in your research and stop shooting from the hip so much (IMO).

Originally Posted by MW

Judy wrote:



Not true! The U.S. Supreme Court did not rule the North Carolina voter photo ID law unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. It was a federal appeals court that ruled the law unconstitutional, that's after it was first ruled constitutional by a lesser court.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/u...-carolina.html

You need to pay more attention to detail.

Oh okay, I knew you'd be on top of that one. US Federal Court of Appeals ruled it picked on too many black voters, right?

Originally Posted by Judy

Oh okay, I knew you'd be on top of that one.

So you were trying to get away with presenting false evidence as your truth?

Originally Posted by jtdc

So you were trying to get away with presenting false evidence as your truth?

What was false about it?

4th U.S. Circuit judges overturn North Carolina’s voter ID law

By Anne Blythe
July 29, 2016 12:41 PM
Updated July 30, 2016 03:07 PM
RALEIGH

Federal appellate judges on Friday struck down a 2013 law limiting voting options and requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls, declaring in an unsparing opinion that the restrictions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the law was adopted with “discriminatory intent” despite lawmakers’ claims that the ID provision and other changes were designed to prevent voter fraud.

The ruling — which could have implications for voting laws in other states and possibly for the outcome of close races in the swing state of North Carolina — sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder, who in April issued a 485-page decision dismissing all claims in the legal challenge.

“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” the ruling states. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

The ruling prohibits North Carolina from requiring photo identification from voters in future elections, including the November 2016 general election. It restores a week of early voting and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and ensures that same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting will remain in effect.

State Board of Elections officials immediately began to pull back advertising campaigns that had been designed to air on TV, radio and other media in the coming months to educate North Carolina voters about what they would need to cast ballots in the coming election.

Challengers of the elections law overhaul shepherded through the Republican-led General Assembly in 2013 and signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory quickly lauded the ruling. Republican leaders criticized the ruling, noting that IDs are required to board airplanes, enter federal courthouses, cash checks and more. They announced their plans to appeal.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who leads the U.S. Justice Department that was a party in the lawsuit challenging the law, praised the appellate panel for striking down a law “that the court described in its ruling as ‘one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.’ ” Lynch described the law as one that placed “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 her 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. Going forward, the Department of Justice will continue our work to protect that sacred right for all.”

Lynch and many others echoed phrases from several lines in the 83-page ruling that bats back contentions by advocates of the law who claimed IDs were needed at the polls to prevent voter fraud.

“Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist,” the 4th Circuit judges wrote.

“This ruling is a stinging rebuke of the state’s attempt to undermine African-American voter participation, which had surged over the last decade,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “It is a major victory for North Carolina voters and for voting rights.”

N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, and state House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican from Cleveland County, issued a joint statement questioning the motives of the three-judge panel — Judge Diana Motz, a Bill Clinton appointee, Judge James A. Wynn Jr., a Barack Obama appointee, and Judge Henry F. Floyd, an Obama appointee to the 4th circuit bench but a George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. District bench.

“Since today’s decision by three partisan Democrats ignores legal precedent, ignores the fact that other federal courts have used North Carolina’s law as a model, and ignores the fact that a majority of other states have similar protections in place, we can only wonder if the intent is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and Roy Cooper to steal the election. We will obviously be appealing this politically-motivated decision to the Supreme Court,” Berger and Moore said.

The voter ID law ensures any North Carolina citizen who wants to vote will have that opportunity,” Berger and Moore contended. They pointed to provisions in state law that allow someone without ID to obtain a Division of Motor Vehicles card at no cost as well as offering people who have been unable to obtain one of the six acceptable forms of ID to cast a provisional ballot.

McCrory, in his statement, accused “three Democratic judges” of “undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state.”

Other voter ID rulings

North Carolina’s law is the third with an ID provision courts have rejected in the past two weeks.

A federal district judge found Wisconsin’s ID law too restrictive. The full 5th U.S. Circuit appeals court found that Texas’s voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act by making it more difficult for minorities to vote and opened the door for putting the state under federal supervision again.

“We applaud the appeals court for recognizing the discriminatory intent behind the monster voter suppression law,” Bob Hall, director of Democracy NC, a voting rights organization, said in a statement about the N.C. case. “The ruling makes clear that the North Carolina General Assembly cherry-picked the law to suppress African American and young voters because of the 2008 election. Today’s ruling begins to right that wrong.”

In North Carolina, the state could ask the full bench of the 4th Circuit to review the ruling. But attorneys and others speculate that even if the full court agreed to review the case, the 2013 election-law changes would not be restored before the November elections.

“Because of this ruling, North Carolinians will now be able to register and vote free of the obstacles created by the Legislature in 2013,” said Southern Coalition for Social Justice senior attorney Allison Riggs.

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, questioned whether the law had been defended well. Though N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office represented lawmakers in the case, Republican leaders also hired private attorneys.

“This is an effort to overthrow the will of the people on voter ID and ballot security, and it is led by the Democrats and, we believe, by Roy Cooper, who did a really lackluster job of defending voter ID while at the same time publicly criticizing it,” Woodhouse said Friday afternoon.

But Cooper’s campaign noted that Cooper, the Democrat running for governor, had advised McCrory in 2013 to veto the bill.

North Carolinians were not the only ones commenting on the decision Friday. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, tweeted her support for the ruling.

The Rev. William J. Barber II, fresh off of addressing the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, admonished lawmakers for changing North Carolina’s election laws that had made the state a “model for the nation in encouraging people to vote.”

Barber is president of the state NAACP that participated in the legal challenge, and the architect of the Moral Monday movement that has protested the voter ID law and other legislation from the Republican-controlled legislature and governor’s office.

“Today the 4th Circuit’s decision gives North Carolinians back an electoral system that allows the people of North Carolina to vote freely this fall,” Barber said in a statement.

In 2015, on the eve of the federal trial over the 2013 law, the legislature softened the ID requirement by adding a provision that allowed voters without acceptable ID to cast a provisional ballot if they could show a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining an ID.

Though Motz differed from Wynn and Floyd on whether the time was right to weigh the “reasonable impediment” option, Wynn wrote for the majority: “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.”

That could be significant for Texas and Wisconsin, where such a softening of the ID requirement was suggested, too, lawyers said.

“This is a very big win for voting rights plaintiffs and the DOJ,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine who writes about law and politics on his electionlawblog.org.

Anne Blythe: 919-836-4948, @AnneBlythe1

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/new...e92595012.html

U.S. Legal News
April 27, 2018 / 7:24 PM / 21 days ago
U.S. appeals court allows Texas to implement voter ID law
Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday allowed Texas to implement a law requiring photo identification at the ballot box, reversing a lower court decision that blocked the measure on the grounds it could be discriminatory against racial minorities.

In a 2-1 decision, a panel from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, which was designed as a fix for previous voter ID legislation struck down for being discriminatory.

The panel said the new legislation enacted last year had “improvements for disadvantaged minority voters,” the latest chapter in a seven-year dispute over voter ID at the ballot box in Texas, the most-populous Republican-controlled state.

The move comes as several Republican-controlled states have pushed voter ID laws they say will prevent fraud at the ballot box. Democrats contend fraud is exceedingly rare and the real intention is to disenfranchise racial minorities, who typically support Democrats and are also less likely to have the required identification.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton praised the decision.

“Safeguarding the integrity of our elections is essential to preserving our democracy,” he said in a statement.

Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which fought against the measure, said: “No law should be allowed to stand that is merely built on the back of a plainly discriminatory law.”

The state’s original law in 2011 was considered one of the nation’s strictest such measures and its opponents said could have excluded up to 600,000 voters.

After years of court losses, Republican Governor Greg Abbott in June signed the new measure, which relaxed some photo identification requirements.

The 5th Circuit judges said the district court in August made a mistake when it halted the law, seeing it as being tainted by the earlier measure struck down by the courts.

The 5th Circuit panel said the new law fixed the flaws of the previous legislation.

Both laws listed authorized photo IDs needed for voting, including a driver’s license, U.S. military ID, a U.S. passport and a Texas concealed handgun license.

The new law allows people who cannot produce an authorized photo ID to show other documentation, such as a utility bill, and sign an affidavit stating they had a reasonable impediment in presenting an authorized photo ID.

Critics contend the new law could be used to intimidate voters, who could face several years in prison if they are found to have lied in affidavits.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN1HY31U

Judy wrote (excerpt):

A federal district judge found Wisconsin’s ID law too restrictive. The full 5th U.S. Circuit appeals court found that Texas’s voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act by making it more difficult for minorities to vote and opened the door for putting the state under federal supervision again.

Not sure why you put the above statement in bold because both Wisconsin and Texas currently have photo voter ID laws. Both states also offer free photo voter ID cards.

The following just happened in Texas 3 weeks ago.

Excerpt:

A federal appeals court upheld Texas’ voter identification law on Friday, saying that it does not discriminate against black and Hispanic voters.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, overturned a lower-court ruling that had struck down the law. It was the latest milestone in a yearslong legal battle over the state’s efforts to require voters to show government-issued identification in order to cast a ballot.

The panel’s decision, by a vote of 2 to 1, was the first time a federal court had upheld the law, a revamped version of one of the toughest voter ID restrictions in the country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/us/texas-voter-id.html

Here's proof of Wisconsin's photo voter ID law:

Excerpt:

Then in August 2016 an appeals court ruled that the law could be implemented as long as the state keeps its pledge to provide temporary free IDs to those in need, and to publicize the law. Until the state says otherwise, NCSL will leave Wisconsin in the "strict photo voter ID" category.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/electio...er-id.aspx#ftn 6

I posted the Texas article about their long fight, and the many changes they made to their law to pass legal muster.