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Today in Voting Rights: A Win in North Carolina; UPDATED: WI voter id to SCOTUS

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Federal Appeals Court Blocks North Carolina Voting Restrictions in Time for Midterm Election

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals today reversed a lower court ruling that had allowed provisions of North Carolina’s restrictive voting law to go into effect before the midterm election. Today’s order restores same-day registration and reinstates out-of-precinct provisional voting on Voting Rights Act grounds. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice are challenging those provisions, as well as the elimination of a week of early voting.

“The court’s order safeguards the vote for tens of thousands of North Carolinians. It means they will be able to continue to use same-day registration, just as they have during the last three federal elections,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

“This is a victory for voters in the state of North Carolina,” said Southern Coalition for Social Justice staff attorney Allison Riggs. “The court has rebuked attempts to undermine voter participation.”

The ruling

Judge James Wynn, an Obama appointee, begins his opinion with a simple declaration – “[t]he right to vote is fundamental.” He then holds that two provisions of the new voter suppression law, the provision eliminating same-day registration and the provision calling for a voter’s ballots to be tossed out if they vote in the wrong precinct, must be suspended pending a full trial of this case on the merits.

Judge Wynn’s opinion reverses the decision of a George W. Bush appointed judge who allowed the entire law to take effect.

PDF of the ruling is here (PDF): NC-Opinion

The Reverend William Barber III deserves credit for not letting up on demanding the right to vote.

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UPDATED: October 2, 2014 8:20am CDT

The ACLU has requested an emergency stay of the voter id requirement for next month’s election

PDF of the brief is here: EMERGENCY APPLICATION TO VACATE SEVENTH CIRCUIT STAY OF PERMANENT INJUNCTION

Yesterday’s Marquette University Poll of the Wisconsin governors race included polling on voter id. Roughly 30% of those polled did NOT realize that the voter id law was going into affect for this election and 1.2% of registered voters, about 44,000, do not have an id.

On Thursday, Justice Kagan asked for a response brief from the State of Wisconsin, due Tuesday, 10/7 at 5pm.

More good voting news below …

From Pew:


With registration deadlines rapidly approaching, almost 110 million of the nation’s approximately 225 million eligible voters live in the 20 states that offer online voter registration.

In 2008, online registration was offered in only two states-Arizona and Washington-accounting for just 4 percent of all eligible voters.

Register to Vote!


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/ 14 Comments

14 comments

  2. JanF

    ElectionLawBlog.com

       Gov. Pat McCrory also announced plans to appeal the reinstatement of the two provisions to the U.S. Supreme Court.

       “I am pleased that the major parts of this popular and common sense bill were left intact and apply to the upcoming election,” McCrory said in a statement. “I have instructed our attorneys to appeal to the Supreme Court so that the two provisions rejected today can apply in the future and protect the integrity of our elections.”

    Wouldn’t it be refreshing to find a Republican governor willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to protect the sacred right of their citizens to vote?

    But when everyone votes, Republicans lose so their only hope is to make it more and more difficult to vote.

  3. JanF

    We need to turn this around:

    In 2008, then-senator Barack Obama made North Carolina history, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture the state since Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory. Blacks, who make up 22% of the state’s population, turned out in droves to vote. Nearly 72% of registered black voters went to the polls that year, overtaking white turnout rate in the state for the first time.

    In the 2010 midterm elections, however, many of the Democratic Party’s core constituency stayed home.

    Just 17% of voters ages 18-25 and 41% of black voters cast ballots that year, according to data collected by Democracy North Carolina, a non-partisan research and advocacy organization based in Durham, N.C. Republicans went on to sweep both chambers of the state legislature that year and in 2012, when they also clinched the governor’s office.

    And we know what happens when Republicans climb into power. They do everything they can to game the system so that they won’t lose that power even when the people no longer support them. They do that by shrinking the franchise until only People Like Them can vote.

    Unions and Planned Parenthood have boots on the ground in NC:

    In some ways, Election Day already has arrived in North Carolina. Absentee ballots went out in early September; in-person, early voting starts Oct. 23.

    In the time left, both sides are scrambling to secure votes. Working America, a group affiliated with the AFL-CIO, is pushing to reach 150,000 households in the Greensboro area, where African Americans make up more than 40% of the population.

    Planned Parenthood, which aims to talk to 400,000 North Carolina voters by Election Day, is piloting what it calls a “catch and release” program. It is recording likely Hagan supporters explaining why they should vote on Election Day. Instead of getting a phone call with a generic recorded reminder to cast a ballot on Nov. 4, Planned Parenthood will play the voter’s unique message back to him or her.

    Think of it as nagging yourself to vote.

  4. JanF

    ACLU Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Block Wisconsin Voter ID Law

    The following is a statement from Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project:

    “Thousands of Wisconsin voters stand to be disenfranchised by this law going into effect so close to the election. Hundreds of absentee ballots have already been cast, and the appeals court’s order is fueling voter confusion and election chaos. Eleventh-hour changes in election rules have traditionally been disfavored precisely because the risk of disruption is simply too high.””

    The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) asked for $460,000 for voter education funds but the request has to be approved by the Republican state legislature. The money was set aside for it in 2012 when the law was first passed but not reauthorized.

    The latest Marquette Poll shows that 20% of voters do NOT realize that they need a photo id to vote next month.

  5. JanF

    SCOTUSblog

    Arguing that one in ten voters already registered in Wisconsin may not actually get to cast their ballots this year, civil rights and citizens’ advocacy groups asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to bar a new requirement to produce a photo ID before voting.[…]

    If the Supreme Court does not act now to permit voting without the photo ID requirement, the application asserted, the lower court’s action “will sow confusion at the polls and discourage voting in the November 4 general election….Chaos in an election – especially when entirely preventable – is undemocratic.”

    Presumably, state officials will be given a chance to respond to the challenge before Justice Kagan or the full Court acts on it.

    ~

    ElectionLawBlog

    The key question before the Court is not whether the challengers can ultimately convince the Supreme Court that Wisconsin’s voter id law violates the Constitution or Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. On that question, as I indicated in my Slate column this week, there is a good chance the Court divided 5-4 on the scope of both of these provisions.

    Instead, the key question is whether Wisconsin has a strong enough state interest in its sovereignty over elections to implement a voter id law very quickly before the election, when there has been no preparation and when the undisputed evidence shows that, by the state’s own account, up to 10 percent of the state’s voters could be disenfranchised (a position the 7th Circuit en banc dissenters called shocking).[…]

    C’mon folks. This should be a no brainer. You don’t impose new requirements in the weeks before an election without adequate preparation which runs the serious risk of disenfranchising voters. If the Supreme Court doesn’t recognize that, we are in even worse shape than I thought.

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