The Supreme Court on Monday said that it had zero time for North Carolina and its shenanigans, rejecting an appeal to reinstate its stupid voter-identification laws, which a lower court had ruled targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”
The justices instead let stand the lower court’s ruling, which struck down the photo-ID requirement and reduction in early voting, among other provisions, the Associated Press notes.
As the report notes, the situation was further complicated when Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, and state Attorney General Josh Stein attempted to withdraw the appeal, which was first filed when then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, was in office.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that the political uncertainty raised questions over who is authorized to seek an appeal of the lower-court ruling and that nothing should be read into the court’s decision to refuse to hear the argument.
As AP notes, when the law passed, North Carolina Republicans claimed that voter ID was necessary to improve the integrity of elections. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that the state had provided no evidence of the in-person voter fraud that the ID would actually address. The court ruled that the law was enacted with intentional bias against black voters. The law was amended in 2015 to include a way for people to vote even if they were unable to get a photo ID.
The issue is markedly similar to the court fight over Texas’ voter-ID law, which was also struck down for targeting minorities. As AP reports, Republicans in both Texas and North Carolina swiftly moved to enact new voting measures shortly after the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act in 2013 that had required them to get approval before changing laws dealing with elections.
Needless to say, activists, civil rights groups and even the Obama administration quickly got involved, filing lawsuits against the new laws. Just before Trump took office, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject the North Carolina appeal. The Trump administration, however, has already dropped its objections to the Texas law.
Read more at CBS News.