February 26, 2020/Press

Local and National Editorial Boards Rip Moore and Berger for Discriminatory Voter Suppression law

Raleigh –  This week, local and national editorial boards exposed Republicans’ voter suppression agenda as a transparent attempt to keep people of color from voting after a second court ruled a Republican voter suppression law was discriminatory. 

The Washington Post editorial board praised courts for “seeing through” the “subterfuge used by Republicans to interfere with voting,” and said that the courts “made a powerful statement about American values.” 

The Winston-Salem Journal questioned Republicans’ “sincerity on voter fraud,” blasting Speaker Moore’s attempt to attack the courts as “brazen and ironic” and reminding Republicans that voter suppression laws are extremely unlikely to prevent “voter fraud” and that the only actual election fraud  “actually happened in the GOP primary in the 9th Congressional District in 2018.” The editorial ended by telling Republicans that “this dog won’t hunt” and that they should “stop its barking on this trump-ed issue and move on.”

The editorials come after the state Court of Appeals chose to unanimously side with democracy and against a discriminatory voter suppression law last week. The Republican voter law would “disproportionately impact African American voters to their detriment,” according to the court, the second such opinion finding that the Republican legislature’s voter suppression law is discriminatory.

“Republicans would rather make it harder to vote to protect their feeble majorities than allow every North Carolinian their right to make their voice heard,” said North Carolina Democratic Party Executive Director Meredith Cuomo. “Thankfully, our courts have stood up to this discriminatory law. It’s time for Republicans to drop this charade and stop trying to keep people from voting.” 


The Washington Post: Courts are seeing through Republicans’ voter suppression trickery
By The Editorial Board
February 22, 2020 

  • A day after a state appeals court in North Carolina temporarily blocked a new voter identification law that discriminates against African American voters, a federal appellate court ruled that Florida can’t use wealth as a barrier to restoring the voting rights of ex-felons.
  • Intent to discriminate was a “primary motivating factor” behind the voter ID law enacted in 2018 by North Carolina’s Republican legislature, as per the judgment of a three-judge panel of the state’s Court of Appeals in a ruling issued Tuesday.
  • The decision, which comes after a federal court in a separate case had already blocked the voter mandate at least through this year’s primary elections, said that the voter ID requirements crafted by Republicans to implement a voter referendum “are likely to disproportionately impact African-American voters to their detriment.” The law requires acceptable ID to vote but pointedly excludes types of identification disproportionately held by African Americans.
  • It is shortsighted to view the rulings through the sole lens of the next election. In both cases, the courts saw through the subterfuge used by Republicans to interfere with voting. In doing so, they made a powerful statement about American values.


Winston Salem-Journal: Our view: A fraudulent cause
By The Editorial Board
February 23, 2020 

  • As far as the courts are concerned, the state’s Voter ID law is ill-conceived, unfair and calculated to disadvantage a certain group of voters.
  • But the details spell out an underlying agenda. For instance, the law bans IDs more likely to be possessed by African Americans, such as public assistance IDs and state employee IDs.
  • As for the GOP’s sincerity on voter fraud, you be the judge. The kind of fraud they purport to be targeting is extremely rare. Further, they all but ignored a more likely source of fraud, absentee voting, until it actually happened in the GOP primary in the 9th Congressional District in 2018. Charlotte Republican Mark Harris dropped out of that race after evidence of the fraud surfaced and a political operative who had worked for Harris was arrested. The scandal left voters in the district without representation in Congress for months and forced a redo of that election.
  • Moore’s use of the verb “suppress” was both brazen and ironic. It’s a familiar strategy in the GOP playbooks to suppress voting through gerrymandering and other tactics. Remember, a previous state voter ID law, nixed by the courts in 2016, was voided by a federal court that found it had targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.”