![]() ![]() 23 Democracy North Carolina estimated that the law had prevented 30,000 to 50,000 people from voting. Senate, defeating incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan by 48,000 votes. 22 Republican Thom Tillis, who had served as the Speaker of the state House of Representatives when the law was enacted, secured a seat in the U.S. For example, eliminating the first week of early voting, which nearly 200,000 people had used in 2010, translated into longer lines on Election Day, especially in predominantly Democratic urban precincts, where waiting times reached as long as three hours. 21 As a result of the new law, North Carolina voters encountered many problems at the polls in 2014. 19 During the litigation challenging the law, one federal judge asked the state’s lawyers: “Why doesn’t North Carolina want people to vote?” 20 The Obama Administration’s Justice Department would never have precleared such changes. In framing the bill, Republican legislators, according to a subsequent court finding, “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” 18 For example, African Americans were more than twice as likely as whites to opt for same-day registration and significantly more likely to use early voting and provisional ballots. 16 The new law also shortened the early voting period, restricted same-day voter registration, eliminated provisional ballots for those turning up at the wrong precinct on Election Day, terminated preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and rescinded the automatic restoration of voting rights for individuals convicted of felonies upon the completion of their criminal sentences. 15 The legislature had not previously considered a voter identification requirement necessary, but blacks had turned out to vote at higher rates than whites did in 20, with Barack Obama on the ballot, and Latino and college student turnout had also increased. Holder, 14 they enacted a law imposing a strict voter identification requirement that excluded public-university student identification cards and public-employee identification cards. Seven weeks after the Court’s 2013 ruling on the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. North Carolina Republicans apparently did not receive the Chief Justice’s memo either. 12 Republican Governor Rick Perry signed the bill, declaring: “This is what democracy is really all about.” 13 11 By contrast, the Democratic caucus in that legislature included eleven Caucasians, seventeen African Americans, thirty-two Latino Americans, and two Asian Americans. 10 Of the 120 Republicans in that Texas legislature, all but six were white. ![]() 9 Indeed, the investigation had failed to reveal a single instance of voter impersonation fraud. 8įurther, the Texas law did not require identification to submit an absentee ballot, a voting option used more frequently by Republicans than by Democrats, even though the State Attorney General’s investigation of voter fraud found that absentee-ballot fraud was much more prevalent than voter impersonation fraud. 7 Moreover, nearly a third of the state’s counties, including some with large populations of people of color, did not have motor vehicle offices, which provide driver’s licenses, the most common form of voter identification. 6 Hundreds of thousands of registered Texas voters did not possess valid forms of voter identification under the law, including disproportionate numbers of African Americans and Latino Americans. 5 The list of approved forms of identification included those more commonly possessed by Republican-leaning voters, such as a concealed handgun permit, but not those more commonly possessed by Democratic-leaning voters, such as college identification cards. Texas Republicans apparently did not receive Chief Justice Roberts’s memo announcing how much “our country has changed.” Just hours after the decision, Texas implemented a law, enacted two years earlier but blocked by preclearance, that required government-issued photo identification to vote. 2 Announcing that “history did not end in 1965” 3 and that “ur country has changed,” Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the conservative majority of the Court, ruled that the geographic coverage formula contained in section 4(b) and used to identify jurisdictions subject to section 5 was outdated and could no longer be constitutionally justified. 1 Under that provision, most states of the former Confederacy had been required to “preclear” changes to their voting laws and practices with a federal court in Washington, D.C., or with the Department of Justice to ensure those changes did not deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of race. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated the geographic coverage formula of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, effectively abrogating the preclearance requirement in section 5 of the Act. ![]()
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