FOCUS: Charles Pierce | North Carolina's Voting Laws Are Conspicuously Suppressing the Vote
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "In upholding the voter suppression laws in the now consistently insane state of North Carolina, Judge Thomas Schroeder, another gift to the Republic from the late Avignon Presidency, has walked right on the same glory road that led Chief Justice John Roberts to cut the viscera from the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County."
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Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "In upholding the voter suppression laws in the now consistently insane state of North Carolina, Judge Thomas Schroeder, another gift to the Republic from the late Avignon Presidency, has walked right on the same glory road that led Chief Justice John Roberts to cut the viscera from the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County."
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And yet they were just upheld by a Bush-appointed judge.
id you hear the trumpets in the sky Monday evening? The Day of Jubilee has sounded again, this time in North Carolina.In his ruling, the judge suggested that past discrimination had abated. "There is significant, shameful past discrimination," he wrote. "In North Carolina's recent history, however, certainly for the last quarter century, there is little official discrimination to consider."
In upholding the voter suppression laws in the now consistently insane state of North Carolina, Judge Thomas Schroeder, another gift to the Republic from the late Avignon Presidency, has walked right on the same glory road that led Chief Justice John Roberts to cut the viscera from the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County. The conservative movement has worked hard to salt the federal judiciary with people who believe that government has done all it can in the fight against institutional racism, and that the fight itself was won decades ago, and that the country never backslides once it has achieved progress. Combined with this fantastical vision of a country that exists somewhere between the Western Isles and the Big Rock Candy Mountain, these judges also appear completely oblivious to how most people—and especially, most poor people—actually exist in the world. And it is all of a piece. Once Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee, every likeminded federal judge in the system sang along with the choir. It is truly a remarkable, and systemic, triumph of politics over one of the three branches of the federal government.
"North Carolina has provided legitimate state interests for its voter ID requirement and electoral system," Judge Schroeder said near the end of his 485-page opinion. The judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush, found that North Carolina's system was not beyond "the mainstream of other states."
The "legitimate state interest" is, of course, the battle against practically non-existent voter fraud. And, of course, the argument that North Carolina's system was not beyond "the mainstream of other states" could have been made honestly in 1955 as regards, say, the poll tax. This decision is a magnificent demonstration of the power of strategic denial.
As to the tenuous connection that Judge Schroeder's decision has with the real world, we only have to look back a little more than a month, when North Carolina ran its primaries, which were the first elections to be conducted under the law that Schroeder now has upheld. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, and especially not to the people who designed this law, the election was a huge and chewy cluster of fck.
About 218,000 North Carolinians, roughly five percent of registered voters, do not have an acceptable form of government-issued ID that is now required under state law to cast a ballot. Early voting offered a glimpse of the problems that will arise on Tuesday—during the past ten days of early voting, many college students were blocked from the polls. North Carolina's WRAL reported that 864 people across the state had cast provisional early ballots because they did not have acceptable forms of ID, and four of the five counties with the highest concentrations of provisional ballots from voters without ID were in places with college campuses.
It got worse as the day went along, and the problems were all the result of the new regulations.
Durham officials couldn't be reached Wednesday for an update on provisional voting. Wake County had about 8,000 provisional ballots. Wake also had its highest turnout for a presidential primary in years, at 41 percent. Statewide, turnout was about 35 percent—similar to 2012 but slightly lower than 2008, when it was a record 37 percent. Across the state, volunteers for Democracy NC spoke with people who reported trouble voting. Bob Hall, the group's executive director, said voter ID laws appear to have been enforced differently throughout the state, that polling workers often appeared untrained or overworked, and that some voters reported they weren't allowed to cast provisional ballots when a problem arose. "All the problems from this primary will be far worse in the general election," Hall said in a news release. His group has been a vocal opponent of the new ID laws. In Durham, some voters also had trouble finding a precinct on N.C. Central University's campus. It was moved from the student union to the law school, although the county board of elections didn't update its website to reflect that until about 4 p.m. Tuesday.
It is important to realize that, a month ago, they took out these new laws for their first shakedown cruise and the result was confusion and frustration. Both of these were conspicuously focused on certain areas and certain classes of voters. On Monday, in his decision upholding the new regulations, and with all of this having already occurred, Judge Schroeder wrote:
The plaintiffs "failed to show that such disparities will have materially adverse effects on the ability of minority voters to cast a ballot and effectively exercise the electoral franchise" as a result of the 2013 state law, Schroeder wrote. That argument was made more difficult after black voter turnout increased in 2014, he wrote.
Look, a lot of these folks managed to jump through the hoops the legislature so cunningly put in place. So what's the problem? The Day of Jubilee is a wonder indeed.
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