Almost a year ago today, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law a comprehensive voter suppression bill incorporating numerous different tactics used to restrict voting in other states. Among other things, the law imposed a strict voter ID requirement, a common provision used to reduce turnout among minority, low-income and student voters. It cut a full week of early voting. And it will prohibit certain kinds of voter registration drives.
On Friday, Judge Thomas D. Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee, held that this law could go into effect — at least for the 2014 elections. The plaintiffs in this case, which included the United States, various civil rights organizations and the League of Women Voters, had asked Schroeder for a “preliminary injunction,” a temporary order suspending various parts of the voter suppression law until his court holds a full trial in 2015. In Friday’s order, Schroeder denied this request.
Much of Schroeder’s order is defensible. As Schroeder notes early in his opinion, the fact that North Carolina’s law is bad policy does not necessarily make it illegal or unconstitutional. And some of the arguments raised against the North Carolina law are legitimately quite weak. Judge Schroeder is rather charitable, for example, when he describes a claim that a provision eliminating same-day voter registration violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s requirement that citizens over the age of 18 be allowed to vote as a “novel claim.”
Similarly, the impact of Schroeder’s decision to allow the law to go into effect is mitigated by the fact that the law’s voter ID provision does not itself take effect until 2016. The law calls for a “soft rollout,” where, in the upcoming election, voters will be “notified that photo identification will be needed to vote beginning in 2016″ and required to sign an acknowledgement that this requirement is coming if they indicate that they do not have ID. Given the fact that the voter ID requirement will not actually prevent anyone from voting until 2016, however, Schroeder’s conclusion that it will not irreparably harm the plaintiffs during the 2014 election is a fair conclusion.
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