The left’s crusade to end election integrity in the name of “voting rights” will advance a step further after a voter ID law in North Carolina was struck down by Democrats on the state’s Supreme Court.
In a 4-3 decision that was split along partisan lines, Democrats claimed the law was designed to discriminate against black voters.
Voter ID struck down
The court’s three Republicans wrote that there is “no evidence that (the law) was passed with race in mind, let alone a racially discriminatory intent.” But the Supreme Court’s majority upheld a lower court ruling which claimed the law had a racial motive, despite being “facially neutral.”
“The provisions enacted … were formulated with an impermissible intent to discriminate against African American voters in violation of the North Carolina Constitution,” Associate Justice Anita Earls wrote in the majority opinion.
Earls claimed that Republicans passed the law knowing that it “required the specific IDs African-American voters disproportionately lack.”
The left has long claimed that requiring people to prove identity to vote is a form of voter suppression, but voter ID measures are broadly popular. North Carolina Republicans passed the ID requirement after voters in the state approved a 2018 constitutional amendment requiring photo ID to vote.
Power grab
Despite this fairly clear democratic mandate, the law remains blocked four years later. Republican state legislative leaders such as House Speaker Tim Moore (R) accused the “lame duck” Supreme Court, which is flipping to Republican control in January, of a partisan power grab.
“Instead of learning their lesson in the wake of defeat, the outgoing lame duck liberal majority has, once again, defied the will of the voters and rejected voter ID,” Moore said.
Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) likewise decried the court’s liberal “activists” and pledged to double down.
“The people of North Carolina overwhelmingly support voter ID laws. I look forward to respecting their wishes and passing a new voter ID law next year,” he said.
Election integrity in decline
North Carolina is at the center of another high-profile legal dispute that is being weighed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Moore v. Harper, touching on the power of state legislatures over elections. Democrats have framed the case as being about an extreme “theory” of state sovereignty, but Moore has pushed back.
“This case is not about that or any other theory. It’s about the elections clause to the U.S. Constitution,” Moore, who is a plaintiff, told Fox News.
Republicans have complained that states legislatures’ power was widely ignored in 2020, when Democrats capitalized on the COVID pandemic to introduce mass mail-in voting.
The shift has caused significant delays in election results over the past two cycles, but Democrats have pushed back on efforts to return to less convenient, more secure pre-pandemic voting norms as an attack on “our democracy.”