RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina Legislature got a win in a key voter ID case Wednesday, with a federal appeals court ruling that Republican lawmakers didn't act with racist intentions when they passed a 2018 voter ID law.
The legislature had lost the case at trial in late 2019, which had the effect of blocking any voter ID requirements in North Carolina for the 2020 elections. But on Wednesday a three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial judge was too harsh on the legislature in her ruling last year and didn't focus enough on what was actually in the new law.
However, the ruling doesn't automatically mean North Carolina will have voter ID in the future. This case could still be appealed further in the federal court system.
The legislature has also lost, so far, in a separate but related lawsuit over voter ID in the state court system. That case is currently awaiting a hearing at the North Carolina Supreme Court.
But North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore, a Cleveland County Republican, said in a news release Wednesday that he hopes with this latest ruling, voter ID rules will be in place in time for North Carolina's next elections.
"Now that a federal appeals court has approved North Carolina's voter ID law and constitutional amendment, they must be implemented for the next election cycle in our state," Moore said.
Requests for comment from the North Carolina NAACP, which is the main challenger in the lawsuit, weren't immediately answered.
But Democratic lawmaker Sen. Erica Smith of Northampton County — who ran in the party's primary for U.S. Senate earlier this year, ultimately losing to nominee Cal Cunningham — called the ruling "dangerous" in a tweet Wednesday.
"Laws like this are a transparent attempt to suppress the Black vote and have no place in our country," Smith wrote.
Voter ID has a controversial history in North Carolina, although it's supported by a majority of voters.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down some of the civil rights protections within the 1965 Voting Rights Act, including restrictions on North Carolina and other Southern states from changing election laws without approval from the federal government. Less than two months later, Republican legislators in North Carolina passed numerous changes to state election laws, including voter ID.
But that 2013 law was later struck down in federal court, after challengers proved the legislature wrote it to "target African Americans with almost surgical precision."
That ruling happened in 2016. GOP leaders strongly criticized the ruling against them, and they quickly moved to create a ballot referendum for the 2018 elections, asking voters to enshrine voter ID in the North Carolina Constitution.
Voters then passed that amendment, with around 55% of the vote. That same election, Republicans lost their veto-proof supermajority at the legislature. However, they came back in a lame-duck session at the end of 2018 — after the election but before the new Democratic lawmakers were sworn in — and wrote the new voter ID law. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it, but the legislature overrode his veto.
Civil rights advocates then sued, saying that the 2018 voter ID law had been written and passed by many of the same people involved in the unconstitutional 2013 voter ID law.
The trial court judge, Loretta Biggs, agreed that it was tainted because of that. In a ruling issued on New Year's Eve in 2019, she wrote that "racial discrimination and racial polarization have historically pervaded North Carolina's political climate — and still do."
But Wednesday's ruling said Biggs went too far and didn't actually have the evidence necessary to rule the new law unconstitutional.
"The district court penalized the General Assembly because of who they were, instead of what they did," the appeals court ruled.
Republican Senate leader Phil Berger, of Rockingham County, called Biggs "an activist judge" and said he was glad the appellate court sided with Republicans.
"There's legitimate concern today about undermining trust in democracy," Berger said in a press release. "When an activist judge overturns the will of millions of North Carolinians who added a voter ID requirement to their own constitution, and rests her lawless opinion on political talking points and 'fundamental legal errors,' that's destabilizing."
Republican lawmakers have frequently said the 2018 law was less strict than the 2013 one, and that it had been specifically written to avoid some of the same pitfalls that doomed the earlier one. The judges on the appeals court agreed.
They acknowledged "a long and shameful history of race-based voter suppression in North Carolina" — specifically referencing that 2013 voter ID law — but said the ruling striking down the 2018 voter ID law didn't focus enough on what was actually in the law.
They said they reversed the previous ruling against the law, because "it considered the North Carolina General Assembly's past conduct to bear so heavily on its later acts that it was virtually impossible for it to pass a voter ID law that meets constitutional muster."
