Explanation:Last Friday was a big day for voting rights in the United States. Federal courts struck down restrictive voting laws in Kansas and Wisconsin. And in a particularly important decision, the fourth circuit court of appeals delivered a stinging rebuke to North Carolina’s egregious vote suppression law. As the court observed, North Carolina legislators didn’t even try to hide the core purpose of the law: to stop African Americans from getting to the polls.
The politics of North Carolina are a perfect illustration of what led the Republican party to nominate Trump. The southern state, which has seen a large influx of people into its prosperous urban centers, is becoming more liberal – Barack Obama carried the state in 2008, and Mitt Romney carried it by only two points in 2012. North Carolina Republicans have not reacted to these trends, however, by becoming more moderate.
The clash between a Republican party running at full speed to the right while its population was trending to the left led North Carolina to pass a particularly terrible anti-voting law. In 2013, a bare majority of the US supreme court gave the green light to North Carolina by striking down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required states, such as North Carolina, that had a history of discrimination to preclear electoral law changes with the Department of Justice.
In addition to a requirement that voters show particular forms of ID, the state eliminated Sunday voting, narrowed the window for early voting and eliminated same-day vote registration and early registration for 16- and 17-year olds. Voter ID requirements at least have the superficial appearance of addressing the integrity of elections, although in practice the justification is bogus. But most of the provisions in North Carolina’s attack on the right to vote had no purpose, even in theory, other than to make it harder for people to vote.
