Rushing to establish the rules of the road for the upcoming national elections, federal courts in recent weeks have issued a cascade of decisions rolling back restrictive voting laws enacted in the aftermath of a major Supreme Court decision. In 2013, the high court struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. No longer would areas of the country with a history of discrimination in voting be required to pre-clear all changes in voting laws and procedures. “Our country has changed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the conservative five-justice majority. Nearly 50 years after the Voting Rights Act became law, he said, instances of blatant race-based discrimination were rare. But as soon as the covered state and local governments were freed from the pre-clearance mandate, Republican legislatures in some 17 states adopted new laws that civil rights groups said were targeted at suppressing the minority vote. Among the controversial measures: strict voter ID requirements, elimination of early voting days, and a variety of other provisions.
The Supreme Court, for the most part, allowed those restrictions to remain in place for the 2014 elections, arguing that the fall of an election year is too late to intervene without causing chaos and confusion. This year the shoe is on the other foot. Courts have fairly consistently been striking down those restrictions, culminating in some big wins for civil rights forces in late July and early August.
The biggest win for voting rights advocates was in North Carolina, where a federal appeals court panel unanimously threw out not only the voter ID requirements, but numerous other provisions that the court said were enacted with the intent of making it harder for minorities to vote. The judges pointedly observed that Republican leaders drew up the new laws in North Carolina only after receiving data showing that African-American voters would be the most significantly and adversely affected. “We cannot ignore the record evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history,” the panel wrote.
The other huge win was in Texas, where the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, perhaps the most conservative federal appeals court in the country, balked at the Texas voter ID law, ordering the lower court to make it easier for people to vote. Similar rulings followed in Wisconsin, Ohio and South Dakota. And in Kansas, a state with a foreign-born population of 6.8 percent, courts have repeatedly rejected efforts by the Republican secretary of state to require voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote.
Full Article: Stricter Voter ID And Other Voting Laws Rolled Back In Slew Of Court Decisions : NPR.