A spate of federal court rulings against voting restrictions in five U.S. states will make it easier for residents to cast ballots in the November elections but may lead to chaos at polling locations, according to legal scholars. “There may well be confusion on Election Day, even if things are implemented the way the courts have decided,” said University of California, Irvine law professor Richard Hasen. In recent weeks, courts struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law, Wisconsin’s restrictions on early and absentee voting, and Kansas’ proof of citizenship requirement. A judge blocked North Dakota’s voter ID law, and an appellate court sent Texas’ voter ID law back to a lower court with instructions to devise a way to allow those lacking state-approved identification to be able to cast a ballot. “Judges are beginning to wake up and see what some of these enacted laws are doing,” said law professor Theodore Shaw, who heads the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “The lower courts and courts of appeals are finding that these voter ID provisions are discriminatory in either intent or effect, or both.”
While Republican-led states insisted they sought only to guarantee the integrity of elections by verifying the identity of those casting ballots, ruling after ruling found the states had erected barriers that would impede voting by racial minorities. An appellate court found North Carolina’s voter ID law had been enacted “with racially-discriminatory intent” and that its provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
In Wisconsin, a federal judge wrote that “a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.”
In North Dakota, a federal judge held that voter fraud is “virtually non-existent” and that that state’s proof of identity requirement “ensnares a disproportionate number of Native Americans, who are especially unlikely to have the documents necessary to obtain a voter ID.”
Full Article: US Courts Strike Down Voter Restrictions in State After State.