The Associated Press is reporting that lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union against a North Carolina voter ID law will go to trial in 2015. The anti-voter ID law groups accuse the law of being “discriminatory,” with the North Carolina NAACP cynically calling the voter ID law the “voter suppression” law.
According to the Washington Post, “The law requires voters to show photo ID at the polls, eliminates same-day registration and pre-registration for students as young as 16, and cuts the early-voting period from 17 to 10 days.”
Even before the case goes to trial, the anti-voter ID groups are attempting to prevent its implementation; on Monday, attorneys for the groups argued for preliminary injunction against some parts of the law at a hearing in a U.S. District Court in Winston-Salem.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder warned at a press conference on Monday, “The state legislature took extremely aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African-Americans. This is an intentional step to break a system that was working, and it defies common sense.”
The Washington Post has stated that the voter-ID law, passed in 2013, also includes other emendations to North Carolina’s elections and campaigns, such as allowing donors to give $5,000 more to candidates than had been allowed before, getting rid of one-box straight-ticketing voting options, and allowing candidates to eschew saying that they “approve this message” on campaign ads.
The National Conference of State Legislatures stated that thirty-four states have passed laws that require voters to show some sort of voter identification to vote.
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