Supreme Court Draws Rebuke for Upholding North Carolina Voting Restrictions

The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated voting restrictions in North Carolina on Wednesday, issuing an order that will prohibit voters from same-day registration and casting their ballots out of precinct—a law that a federal appeals court had previously overturned on the grounds that it discriminated against voters, particularly the elderly, minorities, and those living in underserved communities.

Civil liberty and voting rights advocates expressed outrage at the court’s decision.

“They tried to focus this on voter ID, but that’s not what this is about,” North Carolina NAACP president Rev. Dr. William J. Barber said in a news conference on Thursday. “This has everything to do with voter suppression.”

“More than 70 percent of African-American voters utilized early voting during the 2008 and 2012 general elections,” the ACLU Voting Rights project said in a statement after the ruling, noting that the extra time allows for flexibility with work schedules and eases the burden of finding transportation to polling places. “For many voters, the choice is between early voting or not voting at all,” ACLU said, adding, “This is particularly critical for low-income voters, who are more likely to have hourly-wage jobs that don’t afford them the time to get to the polls on Election Day or during common work hours.”

The order (pdf), which was brief and unsigned, did not detail the reasoning behind reinstating the restrictions, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor were the lone dissenting voices.

“The Court of Appeals determined that at least two of the measures—elimination of same-day registration and termination of out-of-precinct voting—risked significantly reducing opportunities for black voters to exercise the franchise in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” Ginsburg wrote. “I would not displace that record-based reasoned judgment.”

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the act that required states to get approval from the Justice Department for proposed election rules to ensure that minorities were not harmed by them. North Carolina passed their voting laws almost immediately after the decision; had the provision still been in place, those two restrictions “likely would not have survived federal preclearance,” Ginsburg added.