Judge on Voter ID Law: Oh, Please

Voter ID unfairly restricts minorities' right to vote, ruling says

Generally speaking, the more direct and clear a legal ruling, the greater its chances of being right. Verbal gymnastics are needed more for a borderline argument than a clear one.

So let’s turn our attention to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling from last week on the preliminary injunction challenge to North Carolina’s voter ID law. A three-judge panel on the court blocked the state from enforcing two key aspects of the law on Election Day a month from now: elimination of same-day voter registration during early voting; and the dismissal of ballots cast outside a voter’s precinct.

The state is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we’ll see whether the lower court’s ruling has any effect in the land of John Roberts and Associates. But certain excerpts of the ruling, written by Appeals Court Judge James Wynn Jr. (incidentally, a UNC graduate) resonate for their concision and tone of incredulity. You can almost hear the judge shaking his head in amazement:

Setting aside the basic truth that even one disenfranchised voter—let alone several thousand—is too many, what matters for purposes of Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] is not how many minority voters are being denied equal electoral opportunities but simply that “any” minority voter is being denied equal electoral opportunities …

The district court failed to recognize, much less address, the problem of sacrificing voter enfranchisement at the altar of bureaucratic (in)efficiency and (under-)resourcing. After all, Section 2 does not prescribe a balancing test under which the State can pit its desire for administrative ease against its minority citizens’ right to vote …

Finally, as to the tenuousness of the reasons given for the restrictions, North Carolina asserts goals of electoral integrity and fraud prevention. But nothing in the district court’s portrayal of the facts suggests that those are anything other than merely imaginable …

At the end of the day, we cannot escape the district court’s repeated findings that Plaintiffs presented undisputed evidence showing that same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting were enacted to increase voter participation, that African American voters disproportionately used those electoral mechanisms, and that House Bill 589 restricted those mechanisms and thus disproportionately impacts African American voters …

Though couched in the formal prose of the legal profession, the message is pretty clear to the enactors of the Voter ID law: You guys are full of it. You didn’t pass this law to protect the integrity of elections. You did it to keep black people from voting.

This was obvious from the outset, of course, but it’s encouraging to see it codified in an actual legal decision. I trust that the Supreme Court will issue its own rejection of this argument, and that it will be as convoluted and intellectually dishonest as the law.