North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm’
Last week the U.S supreme court ruled in favour of a North Carolina constituency against the new electora;l laws and policies being pushed by the Republican majority of the state in a burst of both celebration and condemnation.
“We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” admitted Gino Nuzzolillo the campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, one of the plaintiffs in the supreme court ruled.
North Carolina Republicans including speaker of the house, Tim Moore who was named in the Moore v. Harper told the supreme court that they would give him and lawmakers across the state tremendous power over statehood to address a controversial legal theory and federal laws. Also reported North Carolina voting rights
We are still in five-alarm fire in North Carolina says Gino Nuzzolillo of Common Cause
The supreme court rejected the theory by a 6-3 vote, blocking the transfer of statewide authority in drafting election laws, but North Carolina’s Republican Congress is already largely unhindered from the rest of the state government. They hold a veto supermajority in the state legislature, and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court, including a rare move to overturn two recent rulings so far has been handed down, suggesting that it does not serve as congressional scrutiny. A democratic court allowed partisan gerrymandering and demanded voter ID.
The Moore v. Harpervcase began in the state court as a partisan gerrymandering and as part of the case, the state court drew up a preliminary map for the 2022. He allowed the legislature to draw a new map.
“We will continue the redistribution process later this year,” Moore said.
North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto the electoral maps drawn up by the legislature, This means that not even split-party leaders of the executive and legislative can control gerrymandering.
For voting rights in North Carolina, this political reality makes the supreme court’s different voting decisions this term all the more important. In the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, the court rejected Republican claims to repeal another portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This left the avenue for lawsuits in federal court to overturn cards that weaken the voting rights for racial minorities.
Despite winning both of these cases, federal judicial protections for voting rights remain the weakest since at least 2013 when the supreme court repealed the Voting Rights Acts. Still districts applaud these rulings because the legal avenues remaining at the federal level to protect significant advances in voter access and fair representation since the civil rights era are preserved.
What’s Next
Moore and his Republican colleagues are working on three election laws. They have enough votes to pass and overrule a likely veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper unless Republican lawmakers pull out.
S747 is a mass voting act that introduces sweeping changes to voter access including requiring provisional ballots for all voters registered on the same day and changing the deadline for voting by mail.
S747 would change the structure and powers of state and county election commissions, creating a deadlock among political parties rather than giving majority votes in favour of the party that controls the governor’s mansion.
H772 changes rules for election observers, including the potential criminalization of election officials found to interfere with election observers.
In the fall, lawmakers will work on redistributing seats in the U.S House of Representatives. North Carolina is currently a purple state with a Democratic governor but a Republican majority in Congress. According to the current map, North Carolina sent seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress.
According to Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University, this fall’s redrawn map is likely to look similar to the first Republican map proposed in 2021, which would give Republicans a 10 to 4 margin. It was said that there was a high possibility of leading. As an expert witness for the common cause state court, he testified that the map of congress and its equivalent state map were partisan gerrymandering. He expects Democrats Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel to be reassigned to districts that favour Republican candidates.
Executives of common cause and League of North Carolina Conservative voters, both groups that sued the state and won Harper in Moore case, opposed all three bills, holding votes diluted by political groups. He also would oppose any redistribution of electoral districts or minorities. An Associated Press poll found that a majority of the public in both parties viewed gerrymandering as a major problem and the study found gerrymandering to be a major driver of political polarisation and the protection of political extreme candidates has been shown to be a factor.
