A North Carolina voting restrictions law will not be enforced for the November elections, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant a stay in the case.
Though the stay was a victory for voting rights advocates, some liberal commentators were disappointed by the 4-4 split.
The law, adopted days after the Supreme Court effectively struck down sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, requires voters to present a government-issued photo identification before casting ballots. It also eliminated same-day voter registration, and significantly reduced the number of early voting days. In a brutal finding in July, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law, in a blockbuster ruling which declared that the state legislature had acted with discriminatory intent when adopting the law, in violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.
“Thus, in what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,” the three-judge panel wrote.
The 4th Circuit ordered the state not to enforce five provisions of the law. The Chief Justice, and Justices Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito voted to grant a stay for four of those provisions. Justice Clarence Thomas voted to grant a stay for all five. (RELATED: This Is Why North Carolina Thinks SCOTUS Should Save Its Voter ID Law)
This ruling means that thousands of voters who would have been disenfranchised will now be able to participate in the presidential election,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU played a major role in organizing a challenge to the North Carolina law.
Though the vote ensures the law will not be enforced in the November election, many liberal legal scholars and commentators had hoped Kennedy and the Chief Justice would be attracted to the liberal side. They argued that North Carolina’s appeal for an emergency stay was exceptionally weak. The petition itself was filed nearly three weeks after the 4th Circuit’s ruling, eroding the state’s claim that they required emergency action. In addition, there was a ruling on the merits that the North Carolina legislature had acted with discriminatory intent in adopting the law, a finding the state vigorously contests in its brief. In short, the fact posture of the case was not favorable to North Carolina, and many hope Kennedy and Roberts will relax their ideological commitments in order to exert influence of the Court’s ascendant liberal majority.
“If Kennedy and the Chief are going to be in play in future voting wars cases, this stay order does not give an inkling of that,” professor Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UC Irvine School of Law noted on his blog.
The ruling is also a boon to critics of voting restriction laws in the lower courts. With an entrenched stalemate at the Supreme Court, previous rulings striking down similar legislation are, for the time being, likely to stand. (RELATED: A Bad Week For Voter Identification Laws)
In asking for a stay, North Carolina argued that the 4th Circuit’s ruling essentially neuters the Supreme Court’s finding in Shelby, and that the formula the 4th Circuit applied to evaluate its law is even more stringent than the procedures the Supreme Court has already tossed in Shelby, and should therefore be vacated.
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