Democrats notched a victory against the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, negotiating an agreement to keep about 98,000 North Carolina voters from being prevented from voting.
The justice department, which under Donald Trump has moved away from its historical focus on expanding voting rights, sued the North Carolina state board of elections earlier this year, demanding that the state deny a ballot to voters who had not provided a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number when they registered, as required under the Help America Vote Act.
The North Carolina court of appeals ordered the board to seek the information from voters before allowing them to vote in future elections, and the Republican-majority board was going to comply before the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and voting rights groups in the state intervened.
The DNC asserted that the actions demanded by the justice department violated the National Voter Registration Act and had partisan purposes.
The proposed consent order and agreement between the justice department and the state of North Carolina settles the justice department lawsuit and allows voters who had not provided the information to do so while voting with a provisional ballot, which would cure the problem at the polling place. Judge Richard E Myers II, chief of the US district court for the eastern district of North Carolina, must still approve the agreement, said Patrick Gannon, public information director at the state board of elections.
The voting rights section of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division has historically been an enforcer of the Voting Rights Act and the principles of greater ballot access and universal suffrage. Under Harmeet Dhillon, the division’s assistant attorney general, that tradition has been turned on its head. Dhillon gutted the department’s leadership and staff in April shortly after being confirmed, and has refocused the department’s mission on preventing voter fraud and prosecuting noncitizen voting – both of which are exceedingly rare.
