Today, a federal appeals court struck down several provisions of North Carolina’s infamous voter suppression law, H.B. 589. Project Vote President Michael Slater issued the following statement in response:
“North Carolina’s omnibus voter suppression bill was passed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013, and stood as one of the nation’s most blatant demonstrations of why we need to protect voters from discriminatory practices. Today, in a sweeping decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected North Carolina’s ‘meager justifications,’ recognized the state’s ‘true motivation’ as discriminatory, and struck down this shameful law.
“With this important decision—and a similar ruling last week against Texas’s voter ID requirements—we at Project Vote hope that the tide has turned on an era of discriminatory voting laws. Partisan lawmakers have been informed, loudly and clearly, that they can no longer seek to win elections by preventing certain voters from participating in them.
“We congratulate our voting rights colleagues who participated in these landmark cases, and we thank the courts for sending a clear message that discrimination has no place in our democratic system.”