North Carolina voter ID law is struck down as racially discriminatory

IF IT walks, quacks and swims like a duck, the saying goes, then it probably is a duck. On July 29th, three judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals used essentially this reasoning when they issued an 83-page ruling saying it is no accident that North Carolina's voting law looks, sounds and functions like an effort to suppress the voices of black voters. Many provisions of the 2013 bill 'target African-Americans with almost surgical precision', Judge Diana Motz wrote. North Carolina Republicans' 'true motivation' behind the law, she went on, was not to combat voter fraud but to keep reliably Democratic black voters'a"major electoral force"whose "registration and turnout rates had finally reached near-parity" with those of whites'away from the polls.The law that the court found to be largely unconstitutional had always been questionable. From 1965 to 2013, changes to voting practices in a large swathe of North Carolina (and in other states with a chequered history of discriminating against racial minorities) could not be implemented without the approval of the Department of Justice. This federal oversight,...Continue reading
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