North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory wants a federal court to throw out a lawsuit against his restrictive voting measure–but he isn’t offering a reason why. McCrory, a Republican, also is telling a top Democratic state official to keep quiet about his opposition to the controversial law. The fate of the legal challenge to North Carolina’s voting law could offer a key indicator of whether existing protections are strong enough to stop the rash of GOP efforts to make voting more difficult, now that the Supreme Court has invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act. On Monday, McCrory and the state board of elections issued a formal response to an NAACP suit filed in August against North Carolina’s law. McCrory’s filing asked a federal court to dismiss the suit, but made no attempt to rebut the lawsuit’s claims or explain why the law is needed. Instead, it simply repeated multiple times that the governor and the board of elections “deny the allegations” contained in the suit. The bare-bones approach is likely an effort by the governor’s legal team to avoid tipping its hand before going to court. But voting-rights advocates seized on the filing to press their case against the law.
“It is telling that, in all 20 pages of North Carolina’s answer to our lawsuit challenging this onerous voter suppression law, the state not only failed to present anything new, but they also offered no justification for the measure,” Penda Hair, the co-director of The Advancement Project, which worked with the NAACP to bring the lawsuit, said in a statement issued Monday afternoon. “Instead their response is to simply say that our case should be dismissed, and that we should be sent away. Unfortunately for Gov. McCrory and his allies in the General Assembly, that is not going to happen.”
The Republican-backed law, signed by McCrory over the summer, is perhaps the nation’s most restrictive. In addition to requiring a narrow range of state-issued photo IDs, it cuts back on early voting, ends same-day voter registration, and scraps a popular pre-registration program for high-school students, among other provisions.
Full Article: NC governor fights for restrictive voting law | MSNBC.