"It would have been bad enough if the North Carolina Legislature, in a misguided effort to streamline voting procedures, had passed a law that ended up having discriminatory effects. But what happened was far worse than that.
The state’s Republican lawmakers, in passing H.B. 589 in 2013, actually repealed a series of smart and successful voting-rights measures that were enacted over the last 15 years to expand North Carolinians’ access to the most fundamental of all American rights.
Lawmakers claimed that H.B. 589, which was approved in a sneaky last-minute maneuver that insulated it from any real debate, would reduce fraud and inefficiency in elections. In truth, it is a pile of blatantly discriminatory measures that lawmakers knew would make voting harder, if not impossible, for many lower-income citizens — who are disproportionately black and Latino, and many of whom tend to vote Democratic. The election-law scholar Richard Hasen has called it “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades.”
In a federal trial that started Monday in Winston-Salem, the law’s challengers — including the Justice Department, the N.A.A.C.P., the League of Women Voters and the Advancement Project, a civil rights legal group — argue that the law was specifically intended to discriminate against minority voters, in violation of both the Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act."
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