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  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Appeals Court Strikes Down Strict North Carolina Voting Law

    JUL 29 2016, 1:14 PM ET

    Appeals Court Strikes Down Strict North Carolina Voting Law


    by ZACHARY ROTH

    A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a North Carolina voting law seen as the strictest in the nation, finding that Republican lawmakers intentionally discriminated against African-Americans when they passed it.

    A divided 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the measure's provisions "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision."


    The ruling is just the latest court win for voting rights advocates. A different federal appeals court ruled this month that Texas's voter ID law is racially discriminatory and must be softened. And a district court softened Wisconsin's ID law, too, though that decision is being appealed.


    Related: Cutbacks to Poll Monitor Program Raise Voter Intimidation Fears


    The office of North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, who signed the law and has championed it, didn't immediately respond to an inquiry about whether the state planned to appeal the ruling. McCrory is in a tight re-election battle with Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat, who has refused to defend the law in court.


    The voting law imposed a voter ID requirement, cut early voting opportunities, eliminated same-day voter registration and banned out-of-precinct voting, among other provisions.


    The court found that by 2013, African-American registration and turnout rates had reached near parity with those of whites. But weeks after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, Republicans said they planned to enact an "omnibus" voting law.

    The court's ruling continued: "Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African-Americans."


    Related: Texas Voter ID Ruling Offers Stinging Rebuke to Law's Backers


    The law was challenged by voting rights groups and the U.S. Justice Department. A district court earlier this year upheld the law. But the appeals court found that the lower court erred by seeing the law's goals as partisan rather than race-based. The state's history of racial discrimination in voting, the appeals court said, "highlight[s] the manner in which race and party are inexorably linked in North Carolina. This fact constitutes a critical — perhaps the most critical — piece of historical evidence here. The district court failed to recognize this linkage, leading it to accept "politics as usual; as a justification for many of the changes in [the voting law]. But that cannot be accepted where politics as usual translates into race-based discrimination."


    Because the court found that the law was designed to discriminate, not just that it had that effect, it raised the possibility that North Carolina could be put back under the pre-clearance regime that was lifted by the Shelby decision. That would mean the state would be required to get federal approval before any changes to voting laws could go into effect. It will be up to the district court to decide that issue.

    http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...ng-law-n619836

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    Administrator ALIPAC's Avatar
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    What a bunch of bull! NC Republicans did not target blacks with precision unless one is to assume that the most voter fraud is going on in the heavily black voter Democrat precincts.

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    Senior Member posylady's Avatar
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    People have to show their id for foodstamps, insurance, check cashing, banking, to drive a car for just about everything. Is anyone going to tell me that their are still people out there who don't have a legal id? This is insane.

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    MW
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    Senior Member MW's Avatar
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    The NCDMV will issue a voter ID card free of charge to those not owning an acceptable voter ID card. The eliminates the excuse that low income people can't afford a voting ID.

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    The voter ID law had nothing to do with black Americans, it has to do with illegal aliens and non-citizens trying to vote in our elections!!
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    Judicial Watch: Should Ginsburg Sit Out NC Voter ID Case?

    Friday, July 29, 2016 04:00 PM
    By: Todd Beamon

    Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton Friday questioned whether Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse herself from any future action regarding the North Carolina voter ID case that a federal appeals court struck down because it was discriminatory.

    "Given her comments attacking Donald Trump, there's a real question about whether Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse herself from the North Carolina voter ID case," Fitton said.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., ruled that the law discriminated against African Americans.

    Under the law, voters would have been required to show photo identification when casting their ballots in the November election.

    Other restrictions were also blocked by the court, including those that scaled back early voting, that prevented residents from registering and voting on the same day, and that eliminated voters' ability to cast ballots outside their assigned precincts.

    Ginsburg, 83, came under fire earlier this month for slamming Republican presidential nominee in interviews with The New York Times and The Associated Press.

    She told the Times that "now it's time for us to move to New Zealand" if Trump wins in November — and told CNN that Trump was a "faker" who "really has an ego."

    The liberal justice, long known for her candor, later apologized for her "ill-advised" public criticism of Trump.

    Many legal scholars questioned the wisdom of Ginsburg's comments, with Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz telling Newsmax TV that "I think she was wrong in expressing those views.

    "The unwritten law is that justices don't express their views," he told "The Hard Line" host Ed Berliner.

    http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/supr.../29/id/741288/
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  7. #7
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Judy View Post
    The voter ID law had nothing to do with black Americans, it has to do with illegal aliens and non-citizens trying to vote in our elections!!
    North Carolina's Deliberate Disenfranchisement of Black Voters

    A federal appeals court finds the impact of the state’s voting law can only be explained by “discriminatory intent.”




    Updated on July 29 at 9:30 p.m.

    DURHAM, N.C.—The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down key portions of North Carolina’s strict 2013 voting law on Friday, delivering a stern rebuke to the state’s Republican General Assembly and Governor Pat McCrory.

    The three-judge panel in Richmond, Virginia, unanimously concluded that the law was racially discriminatory, and it blocked a requirement that voters show photo identification to vote and restored same-day voter registration, a week of early voting, pre-registration for teenagers, and out-of-precinct voting.

    “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,” wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz.

    North Carolina’s law, often described as the strictest in the nation, passed shortly after the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.

    That section required states with a history of voter discrimination to “preclear” any changes to voting laws with the U.S. Department of Justice. Freed from that requirement, the General Assembly passed a slate of changes, including the photo-ID requirement. Both sides effectively agreed that these changes disproportionately affected poor, elderly, and African American voters, who were less likely to hold the required forms of photo ID, more likely to move frequently, and more likely to take advantage of early voting. These voters also vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

    “In North Carolina, restriction of voting mechanisms and procedures that most heavily affect African Americans will predictably redound to the benefit of one political party and to the disadvantage of the other,” Motz wrote. “As the evidence in the record makes clear, that is what happened here.”

    A range of plaintiffs, including the North Carolina NAACP, the Advancement Project, and the Department of Justice quickly sued the state over the law. In April, federal district-court Judge Thomas Schroeder upheld the law, finding that plaintiffs had “failed to show that such disparities will have materially adverse effects on the ability of minority voters to cast a ballot and effectively exercise the electoral franchise.”

    Echoing Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County, Schroeder stated that while the Old North State had a shameful history of racial discrimination, it was just that—history. “There is significant, shameful past discrimination.

    In North Carolina's recent history, however, certainly for the last quarter century, there is little official discrimination to consider,” he wrote.

    The circuit court rebuked Schroeder, saying that the district court had “fundamentally erred” and “seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees.” For example, Friday’s decision noted, black participation in elections had been rising steadily in the year before the law passed, periodically bolstered by federal intervention. “Not coincidentally, during this period North Carolina emerged as a swing state in national elections,” Motz drily noted. She also wrote:


    The General Assembly enacted [these changes] 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.


    In 2008, Barack Obama narrowly won North Carolina in the presidential election. But in 2010, Republicans captured both houses of the legislature, and two years later McCrory defeated Lieutenant Governor Walter Dalton, as Mitt Romney edged Obama. The GOP undertook a program of conservative reforms, overturning a tradition of bipartisan moderation in the state. Among those changes was the voting law. While a bill had been under consideration, the Shelby County decision led state Senator Tom Apodaca to comment, “Now we can go with the full bill.” Though commonly referred to as a voter-ID law, similar to those passed or considered in other states, many advocates saw the other provisions as equally or more important.

    In the end, it was Schroeder’s lengthy work on the case—a nearly 500-page opinion, plus 25,000 pages of record—that seemed decisive in the circuit-court decision. The panel of judges ruled that there was so much information in the record that they did not need to remand the case to the district court, and could determine that Schroeder made an erroneous factual finding on their own.

    For example, the circuit-court decision makes much of the fact that legislators requested relevant data before passing the bill.

    “Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans,” Motz wrote. “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.”

    For example, the voter-ID law was both “too restrictive and not restrictive enough.” The circuit court found that the law harmed African American participation, but did little to combat fraud, the stated purpose, because fraud was more common in mail-in absentee voting, which was not affected.

    The decision is a huge win for civil-rights advocates, who have argued in cases around the nation that voter-ID laws and other similar truncations are fighting a problem that does not exist—there is minimal evidence of voting fraud, despite insistence that such laws are essential to maintaining the sanctity of the vote—and are in fact designed to limit turnout among traditionally Democratic voters, and therefore help elect Republicans. (On occasion,voter-ID advocates trip up and say the same publicly.)

    Because North Carolina’s law was among the nation’s most sweeping, and because it came so quickly after Shelby County, it has been watched as a bellwether for voting-rights cases nationwide. A favorable outcome for the state would likely embolden other conservative states to undertake similar overhauls, while a negative one would force them to take another tack, and encourage voting advocates.

    Plaintiffs always expected to have a tougher hearing from Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee, than from the Fourth Circuit, which is stocked with Obama appointees.

    Motz was appointed by Bill Clinton, while the other two judges on the panel, James Wynn Jr. and Henry Floyd, are Obama appointees. Many voting-law experts expect the final decision in the case to be rendered by the Supreme Court.

    The state is likely to appeal the decision. While the justices would be unlikely to render a decision before the November election, the state could request an injunction to keep the law in place as is.

    “We are beyond happy that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals exposed for the world to see the racist intent of the extremist element of our government in North Carolina,” the Reverend William Barber II, president of the N.C. NAACP, said on a press call Friday afternoon. “The ruling is a people’s victory, and it is a victory that sends a message to the nation.”

    Conservative groups, meanwhile, blasted the law. J. Christian Adams, who is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and a longtime voter-ID advocate, criticized the panel of judges for overreaching.

    “Normally, appeals courts remand to trial courts to review the evidence with the guidance of the appeals court. The Fourth Circuit undertook the job of a trial court and the integrity of the upcoming election is worse off because of it,” Adams said in a statement. “This case was brought to extract partisan advantage using the Voting Rights Act and sadly the plaintiffs were successful in turning that important civil rights law into a political weapon.”

    McCrory criticized the ruling on Facebook and suggested the state might seek to appeal the ruling or have it stayed.

    “Three Democrat judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state. We will immediately appeal their decision to strike down our voter ID law and also review other potential options,” he wrote.

    Jay DeLancy, who leads the Voter Integrity Project, which seeks to find and prevent voter fraud, also criticized the decision.

    “Today’s 4th Circuit decision makes it easier for criminal enterprises to exploit North Carolina’s fraud-friendly election laws,” he wrote in a statement. “The court scoffed at the heartfelt concern for election integrity; and instead, demanded further proof that vote fraud exists before they will allow preventative laws to survive. To that we say, be careful what you ask for!”

    If the law is not in effect in November, it could have a major impact. McCrory is locked in a tight reelection race against Democrat Roy Cooper. Senator Richard Burr is expected to face a tight battle to hold his seat against Democrat Deborah Ross. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign has targeted the Old North State as a key swing state, hoping that a win here would block any path to victory for Donald Trump.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...ts-law/493649/
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