Lawyers for Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore filed a motion in federal court Monday to intervene in a lawsuit challenging rules to implement North Carolina’s new requirement that voters present photo identification at the polls. Voters approved adding the ID requirement to the state constitution in November, and lawmakers adopted rules last month outlining what IDs would be accepted. The NAACP quickly sued to block the legislation, naming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and the State Board of Elections as defendants. Cooper vetoed the voter ID rules, and the elections board has since been dissolved by a court order in a separate case, Berger and Moore noted. Also, both parties would be represented in court by Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein’s office, they said.
“Gov. Cooper and Attorney General Stein have deliberately undermined the General Assembly’s efforts to enact voter ID on numerous occasions,” Berger, R-Rockingham, and Moore, R-Cleveland, said in a joint statement. “It is very clear from both their words and actions that they cannot be trusted to defend voter ID, which is why the NAACP deliberately left legislators who enacted the voter ID law out of the lawsuit.
… In vetoing the bill, Cooper called voter ID “a solution in search of a problem” and said the effort had “sinister and cynical origins,” citing a 2013 state voter ID law that federal courts later threw out after determining it was targeted at suppressing minority voting.
Full Article: Legislative leaders want to be part of voter ID lawsuit :: WRAL.com.