Lawmakers targeted Black voters with ID rules, NC Supreme Court says

North Carolina lawmakers violated the constitutional rights of Black voters by targeting them with racially motivated voter ID rules — again — the N.C. Supreme Court ruled on Friday.

The ruling found Republican leaders intentionally wrote the state’s 2018 voter ID law so that its requirements would harm Black voters more than white voters.

Another voter ID law, from 2013, was struck down in federal court for similar reasons.

Justice Anita Earls wrote that “even though the General Assembly had reason to know that African-American voters would be disproportionately affected by (the rules), it still chose to pass a law that required the specific IDs African-American voters disproportionately lack.”

It was one of two major voting rights decisions the Supreme Court issued Friday, The News & Observer reported.

The other case deals with partisan gerrymandering, and underscores the ability of state courts to rule political districts unconstitutional for being gerrymandered to artificially boost the power and influence of one political party’s voters, at the expense of voters on the other side.

On voter ID, Earls wrote, the law was another example of North Carolina’s long history of white political leaders trying to stop Black people from voting. A Democrat who is biracial, Earls had a background in civil rights law before joining the court.

Not only was the law written “with the discriminatory intent to target African-American voters,” she wrote, but the only reason Republicans had enough votes to pass it into law at all was because of racially discriminatory gerrymandering — in districts that were later overturned as unconstitutional.

Republicans were not deterred by Friday’s ruling, however, and announced that they plan to pass a voter ID law again next year.

With their party recently flipping control of the Supreme Court, GOP leaders are confident that this time it will stick. Friday’s ruling was 4-3 along party lines, with all the Democratic justices in the majority and all the Republican justices dissenting.

The dissent was written by Phil Berger Jr., whose father is the top Senate Republican leader and was a main defendant in this case.

In the dissent, the younger Berger repeatedly cited a news article about Republicans flipping control of the court in November’s elections — an indication that the new GOP majority could overturn Friday’s ruling if given the chance, once it takes power in January.

In a footnote that harshly criticized Earls by name, Berger cited that news article and wrote that “the outcome of this case was wholly ‘dependent on what year a party brings its case.’”

His father plans to give him and the rest of the court’s Republican judges another shot at a voter ID ruling next year, once the new GOP majority is seated.

“Regardless of the policymaking goals of the activist justices, the people of North Carolina overwhelmingly support voter ID laws,” the elder Berger wrote in a press release. “I look forward to respecting their wishes and passing a new voter ID law next year.”

How we got here

In 2013, Republican lawmakers passed a number of changes to election law, including a new voter ID rule, that were all struck down after federal courts found that GOP leaders had purposefully written the rules to intentionally target Black voters.

Legislators had requested data on what types of IDs were most prevalent by race, then wrote the rules to allow the types of IDs white people were more likely to have and ban the types of IDs Black people were more likely to have.

That law was ruled unconstitutional in 2016, so in 2018 the legislature asked voters to amend the state constitution to require that voters show ID at the polls, then wrote a new law after voters approved that amendment — which is itself now in legal limbo, due to a different N.C. Supreme Court ruling earlier this summer.

Just like the 2013 law, the 2018 law also was intended to harm Black people’s ability to vote, the Supreme Court ruled Friday. The court said the rules the legislature came up with resulted in a scenario in which nearly 10% of Black voters statewide would lack an acceptable ID, compared to just 4.5% of white voters.

There was also no pressing reason to pass a voter ID law, Earls wrote, since voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.

The N&O has previously reported — and Earls wrote Friday — that there were only 508 allegations of illegal votes cast in the 2016 elections, or 0.01% of the 4.5 million total votes.

And of those 508, only one single case might have been prevented by a voter ID law.

Earls didn’t go into the details. But The N&O previously reported that in that case, a woman went to the polls and pretended to be her dead mother, who she would later say had been a “tremendous Donald Trump fan,” to cast a fraudulent vote for Trump in her mother’s name.

Although she admitted to it after the state caught her, the local Catawba County prosecutor, a Republican, decided not to press charges, The Charlotte Observer reported.

Republicans have said previously that regardless of how prevalent voter fraud might be, having a voter ID law would be useful to improve public confidence in elections. People might be more trusting in the results, the argument goes, if they knew everyone had to show ID to vote.

In her ruling Friday Earls said if the legislature wanted to accomplish that, and not to also discriminate against Black voters, then it could have passed a less strict version of voter ID — more along the lines of what other Southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana require.

She wrote that “given the rarity of voter fraud in North Carolina, a less restrictive law could have been sufficient to deter voter fraud and promote voter confidence in elections had this goal been the law’s only actual purpose.”

A dissent from the court’s Republican justices, however, argues that the legislature actually showed restraint and could have gone much farther than it did, and that they believe “there is no evidence that (the law) was passed with race in mind, let alone a racially discriminatory intent.”

The younger Berger wrote that in general, courts should be very reluctant to rule any of the legislature’s actions unconstitutional.

The majority opinion explicitly jettisoned a key legal norm — to assume lawmakers are acting in good faith — because of the indications of racial discrimination at play. But Berger’s dissent said that was a step too far, and led to the case being wrongly decided.

“It is well-settled that the proper exercise of our judicial power requires great deference to acts of the General Assembly, as the legislature’s enactment of statutes is the sacrosanct fulfillment of the people’s will,” he wrote.

For more North Carolina government and politics news, subscribe to the Under the Dome politics newsletter from The News & Observer and the NC Insider and follow our weekly Under the Dome podcast at campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.