Raleigh – North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin has released the following statement after a state court of appeals blocked a Republican voter ID law, finding it would “disproportionately impact African American voters to their detriment”: 

“Today, the state Court of Appeals has chosen to unanimously side with democracy. This Republican legislature has repeatedly targeted African Americans with surgical precision to keep them from making their voices heard. North Carolina Democrats remain committed to protecting every citizen’s right to vote, and maintain that voter suppression laws like this disenfranchise people of color by unnecessarily creating new hurdles to the ballot box. We need to make it easier to vote – not harder.” 

Today’s ruling is the second recent opinion finding that the Republican legislature’s voter suppression law is discriminatory. In the unanimous decision, the court declares “the General Assembly’s history with voter-ID laws, the legislative history of the act, the unusual sequence of events leading to its passage, and the disproportional impact on African American voters likely created by S.B. 824 all point to the conclusion that discriminatory intent remained a primary motivating factor.” 

In 2013, the legislature passed an unconstitutional voter suppression law that federal judges found targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” Today’s decision follows a December 2019 decision which stated parts of the S.B. 824 “were impermissibly motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent.”