LOD: Voting Rights Defended

For North Carolinians concerned about the maze of bills in the General Assembly designed to make voting harder, here’s a link to a Democracy NC factsheet that provides an update of each bill’s status. The NC General Assembly is set to reconvene in November, when it could take up any of these bills – or it could revive its anti-voter initiative in the short session next May. Meanwhile, in an important voting-rights decision, a U.S. District Court judge turned down a challenge that African-American voters no longer need the federal government to review changes in election procedures affecting Section 5 jurisdictions – which include all of Alabama (where the case arose) and 40 counties in North Carolina. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires federal “pre-clearance” of election changes to prevent intentional or unintentional racial bias in areas with a history of discrimination. The judge made a point of saying that the 17,000 pages placed in the record when Congress reauthorized the VRA in 2006 demonstrated that the law was still relevant and constitutional. Opponents of voting-rights protections have a series of cases in the pipeline to challenge Section 5 and other provisions in the Voting Rights Act, and this case will likely reach the US Supreme Court, where the opponents have some sympathizers, they hope a majority.