RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina Supreme Court issued two important rulings in voting rights cases Friday, on gerrymandering and voter ID.
Both rulings found that Republican lawmakers had acted unconstitutionally to diminish the influence of Democratic voters — by passing a voter ID law with rules that intentionally discriminated against Black voters, and by redrawing the state’s political districts in such a way that rendered many Democrats’ votes essentially pointless in certain elections.
“The right to vote is a fundamental right, preservative of all other rights. If the right to vote is undermined, it renders illusory all ‘other rights, even the most basic,’” Justice Anita Earls wrote in the voter ID case, quoting from a civil rights case from 1964.
Both rulings were 4-3 decisions, purely along party lines with all the court’s Democrats in the majority and all the Republicans dissenting.
“The foundational democratic principles of equality and popular sovereignty enshrined in our Constitution’s Declaration of Rights vest in the people of this state the fundamental right to vote on equal terms,” Justice Robin Hudson wrote in the ruling on the gerrymandering case.
She added that when politicians draw the lines to make sure their party wins far more representation than what people actually voted for, “it deprives a voter of his or her fundamental right to equal voting power.”
The rulings came at the last minute for the voting rights activists who won the cases, since in January the court will switch to a Republican majority. GOP judges swept all of this year’s statewide midterm elections.
In the voter ID ruling, the Democratic justices noted that Republicans had rushed to pass the law during a lame-duck session, after Democrats had taken away some of their power in the 2018 midterms. In a press release Friday, House Speaker Tim Moore said now it’s the Supreme Court doing the same thing, with the parties reversed.
“The lame duck Supreme Court of North Carolina has issued yet another opinion that defies the will of the majority of North Carolinians who voted for the implementation of a photo ID requirement,” he wrote.
The court’s Democratic majority employed a rarely used procedural move to fast-track these and a few other high-profile political cases, The News & Observer reported earlier this year.
While the court didn’t explain its reasoning for the move, it ensured they were argued before the elections and could be ruled on by the end of the year in case the balance of power on the court flipped.
Redistricting
The gerrymandering case was one of two appeals of February’s ruling, also by the state’s highest court, that GOP lawmakers unconstitutionally gerrymandered the state’s new districts for Congress and the state Legislature.
One of those appeals is Moore v. Harper, the case at the U.S. Supreme Court that has attracted national attention for its focus on the “independent state legislature” theory that critics say would be the beginning of the end of American democracy, if the court signs off on the largely unchecked powers North Carolina lawmakers want for themselves and all other state legislatures.
The other appeal focused specifically on the maps used in the 2022 elections for the state legislature, and went back to the North Carolina Supreme Court instead of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In that ruling Friday, the court ruled that the state Senate map is still unconstitutional and needs to be redrawn, but the map for the North Carolina House of Representatives can continue to be used.
In 2022 Republicans were unable to win a supermajority in the House, falling just one seat short after Democrats flipped a red seat outside Charlotte, around Concord. But the GOP did win a supermajority in the state Senate — under maps they will now have to redraw, due to Friday’s ruling.
Beyond that, however, the ruling also took aim at the independent state legislature theory, which suggests that state courts should not be allowed to decide whether their legislators have violated the state constitution with new election laws. While the U.S. Supreme Court is still grappling with that question for federal elections, Friday’s ruling indicated that for state elections, state courts can and should weigh in on election and voting rights cases in the future.
“We expressly and emphatically reaffirm the fundamental right of citizens to vote on equal terms enshrined within our Constitution’s Declaration of Rights, and this Court’s constitutional responsibility and authority to assess legislative compliance therewith,” Hudson wrote in the majority opinion, which all of the court’s Republicans dissented against.
“These principles are — and must remain — the enduring bedrock of our sacred system of democratic governance, and may be neither subordinated nor subverted for the sake of passing political expediency,” she wrote.
Voter ID
Republican state legislators in 2013 passed a set of new election rules, including voter ID, that were struck down as unconstitutional in federal court. In 2018 they tried again, and Friday’s ruling struck those down for the same reason, of racial discrimination.
Earls wrote that “even though the General Assembly had reason to know that African American voters would be disproportionately affected by (the law), it still chose to pass a law that required the specific IDs African-American voters disproportionately lack.”
A dissent from the court’s Republican justices, however, argues that “there is no evidence that (the law) was passed with race in mind, let alone a racially discriminatory intent.”
Justice Phil Berger Jr., whose father is the top Republican leader of the North Carolina Senate and was a lead defendant in the case, wrote that the court should give wide latitude to the General Assembly to pass laws.
“It is well-settled that the proper exercise of our judicial power requires great deference to acts of the General Assembly, as the legislature’s enactment of statutes is the sacrosanct fulfillment of the people’s will,” he wrote.
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