Friday, July 29, 2016
Another GOP election fraud stopped
A three judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has decisively slammed the North Carolina voter ID law. In its decision, it pulled no punches as to how the judges felt about the law.
The sweeping decision, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, was unusually speedy: A judge in Winston-Salem, N.C., upheld the law in April. The appeals court, which sits in Richmond, Va., made its decision clear in the opening pages of a lengthy ruling, questioning the reasoning of the lower court judge.That 'forest for the trees' remark in their opening was an out and out kick in the nuts to the legislature and the previous court that upheld it. North Carolina can still appeal to the court en banc but a stay of the law based on this decision would be likely and kill the law for this election.
“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” the Fourth Circuit panel said of the district court ruling that upheld the law passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”
The appeals court added later, “Faced with this record, we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent.”
In addition to an identification requirement, the law also abolished same-day voter registration and ended preregistration, which had permitted some teenagers to sign up for the voting rolls before they turned 18.
Republicans argued the law protected against fraud, but critics said it was an effort to disenfranchise certain voters, particularly black and Hispanic ones.
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