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Voting rights and civil rights advocates are suing North Carolina over the state's new voter ID law.

Opponents of North Carolina’s voter ID requirements are heading to court.

Six voters challenging the photo ID requirements filed a lawsuit last week in Wake County after the regulations became law.  They also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the law from taking effect until the case can be heard in court.  The lame duck, Republican-dominated General Assembly overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s Dec. 19 veto of an amendment to the state constitution that requires voter ID.

The N.C. NAACP is also suing in the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of North Carolina, challenging the law under the Voting Rights Act and the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

“The North Carolina Constitution provides numerous and inviolable protections for the fundamental right to vote of all its citizens,” said Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represents the plaintiffs.  “Just because the North Carolina Constitution now authorizes, with exceptions, the presentation of a picture ID when voting does not mean those other longstanding protections can be ignored or violated.”

According to plaintiffs, the law, which closely mirrors neighboring South Carolina’s mandate, violates the state constitution by:

• Discriminating against and disproportionately impacting people of color, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause;

• Burdening the fundamental right to vote;

• Creating separate classes of voters who are treated different with respect to their access to the fundamental right to vote;

• Imposing a cost on voting, in violation of the Free Elections Clause in Article I;

• Imposing a property requirement for voting, in violation of the Property Qualifications Clause; and,

• Curtailing voters’ ability to engage in political expression and speech by casting a ballot, in violation of their right of assembly and petition and freedom of speech.
The House of Representatives voted 72-40, to OK the override.

“With today’s veto override of Senate Bill 824, lame duck North Carolina lawmakers have enabled a strict photo ID mandate to vote that will unnecessarily burden eligible North Carolinians’ access to the ballot,” said Democracy North Carolina Executive Director Tomas Lopez. “This poorly-funded legislation’s complicated requirements and hasty implementation deadlines will impact real voters—especially communities of color and those most marginalized in our politics. Lawmakers could have reasonably waited to act until their duly-elected successors were seated. They did not: this is a last-ditch effort to shape our voting rules without hearing from those affected. Our collective work now turns to mitigating this law’s harms, especially in communities that have seen first-hand how voting restrictions discourage participation and damage the integrity of the voting process.”

North Carolina voters approved a referendum last month that would add an identity requirement to the state constitution, which Republicans have long sought as protection against fraud at the polls.

“After several years of debate, North Carolina citizens voted to support voter ID in its state constitution,” North Carolina GOP Chair Robin Hayes said in a statement. “Despite the fact that voter ID is now required, Governor Cooper chose to ignore the people’s will and insulted more than two million voters as ‘cynical,’ ‘sinister’ racists. Today, NCGA Republicans dismissed Cooper’s attempt to ignore the state constitution and implemented the wishes of voters at the ballot box."

Democrats and civil rights advocates counter that voter ID is a solution in search of a problem, especially as enacted by an outgoing General Assembly.

“This is a brazen effort by a lame-duck, usurper legislature to once again legislate voter suppression,” said Irving Joyner, legal redress chair of the state NAACP and counsel for the plaintiffs. “This law is designed to suppress the votes of people of color.  The federal courts have seen through this legislature’s attempts to do this before and we are confident that they will see through this current attempt, as well.”

Said Riggs: “It is the legislature’s duty to balance competing demands in the State Constitution.  It has failed miserably in its exercise of balancing the new ID constitutional amendment, which explicitly allows for exceptions, with the numerous other state constitutional demands that have been interpreted to aggressively protect the right to vote.

“Any legislative scheme that requires voters to present ID when voting must have fail-safe measures to ensure that not one single eligible voter is disenfranchised.  Our state constitution demands it. This legislation does not do that. It simply replicates a scheme that we know disenfranchised approximately 1,400 voters in the March 2016 primaries.”

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice also represented plaintiffs who successfully challenged the state’s 2013 voter ID law, which was ultimately struck down by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

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