Several court rulings released on Friday rolled back Republican attempts to suppress the vote. First up, from The Kansas City Star:
From Kansas to North Carolina to Wisconsin, judges on Friday issued powerful rulings designed to protect the voting rights of Americans.
The most crucial decision locally came in a last-minute victory for 17,500 Kansans, when Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks essentially slapped down part of an overly restrictive 2013 state voter ID law. [...]
The right to vote is a cornerstone of American democracy, one that Kobach and too many other Republican elected officials have been trying to chip away at the last few years.
In most cases, the attacks end up imposing new requirements that are harder for older people and the poor to meet, such as getting access to birth certificates and acquiring state-approved identification forms for those who don’t own cars.
Fortunately, courts have been striking down some of these restrictive measures, and that happened regarding two other GOP-passed laws on Friday.
North Carolina’s 2013 election law was advertised as preventing voter fraud. Instead, it has been exposed as fraudulent lawmaking – voter suppression in the guise of voting protections.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit delivered that stinging
ruling Friday.
North Carolinians heading to the polls this November can put away their photo IDs. The full early voting period will be restored. Out-of-precinct votes will count again. People will once more be able to register and vote on the same day. And North Carolina will go back to being a state that encourages rather than obstructs voting.
Here’s Ari Berman’s take at The Nation on the North Carolina decision:
The state required strict voter ID to cast a ballot, cut a week of early voting and eliminated same-day voter registration, out of precinct voting and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. Today the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated these restrictions, which it said “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision” in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. It reversed a 485-page decision by the district court upholding the law.
This is a huge victory for voting rights—the most significant in the country since the Shelby County v. Holder decision—that will make it easier for hundreds of thousands of voters to cast a ballot this November.
Election law expert Rick Hansen adds context:
A partially divided panel of 4th Circuit judges reversed a massive trial court opinion which had rejected a number of constitutional and Voting Rights Act challenges to North Carolina’s strict voting law, a law I had said was the largest collection of voting rollbacks contained in a single law that I could find since the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act. [...]
This is a very big win for voting rights plaintiffs and the DOJ: This decision is the third voting rights win in two weeks: first in Wisconsin, where a federal district court recently softened the state’s strict voter id law (an issue now on appeal to the Seventh Circuit), and then in Texas, where the en banc 5th circuit not only ordered the trial court to fashion such softening, but it also opened the door to a finding of discriminatory intent, which can put Texas under federal supervision as well. Still it is not a complete victory, given the failure to get NC back under a federal preclearance regime.
In Wisconsin, too, there was a victory for voting rights advocates:
"The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities," U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote.
"To put it bluntly, Wisconsin's strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.” [...]
The decision deals with a swath of election laws that have been modified in recent years by Walker and Republican lawmakers. Peterson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, concluded many of them violate the First Amendment right to free speech, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law and the Fifteenth Amendment protection of the right to vote
And, on a final note, here’s The New York Times on protecting the right to vote:
Legal challenges against similar voter-suppression laws in other states are making their way through the federal courts. Any and all these could be crucial in securing a fair and credible election result in November.
For all the lofty rhetoric the nation heard in the last two weeks about democracy at the Republican and Democratic Party conventions, these recent federal court decisions show the grimier reality of politics and the bitter struggle for basic fairness beyond the national spotlight. The black voters of North Carolina have won a major victory and will now have a better chance of making a difference come November.