The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Wednesday to reinstate North Carolina’s voter identification requirement and keep just 10 days of early in-person voting. The court rejected a request by Gov. Pat McCrory and other state officials to delay a lower court ruling that found the state law was tainted by racial discrimination.
The decision to deny a stay (by an equally divided vote) leaves the Fourth Circuit decision in place, according to Professor Michael Kent Curtis, the Wake Forest Judge Donald L. Smith Professor in Constitutional and Public Law.
“The 4th Circuit decision struck down portions of the Generally Assembly’s purported election ‘reforms’,” he says. “This should mean the voter ID requirement. which the 4th Circuit court found was racially motivated ,should not be in place for the upcoming election and some other provisions of the prior, more voter -riendly, voting laws should be in place, such as same day registration.”
He continues, “To the extent that the prior ‘pre-reform’ law allowed partisan majorities on local boards of election (if approved by the State Board of Elections) to shrink early voting hours, close prior polling places in way that disadvantages black and young and poorer voters — doing that would be disgraceful — and reminiscent of an ugly past.”
Professor Curtis speculates that may well be the next partisan move in an effort to obstruct a more unimpeded access to the right to vote — for rich and poor, and people of all races and conditions.
“The ballot is centerpiece of democracy,” he continues. “A transparent attack on it because certain groups of voters do not vote in a way that pleases a partisan majority of boards of elections would be appalling and unworthy of the tradition of old time Republicans who gave us the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, the 14th that guaranteed equal protection of the laws and the 15th that provided the right to vote may not be abridged on the basis of race or color.”
Professor Curtis is one of the foremost constitutional historians in the United States. His book “Free Speech: The People’s Darling Privilege: Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History” won the Playboy Foundation Heffner First Amendment Award for the best book of its year on the subject of the 1st Amendment. The North Carolina Literary and Historical Society also chose the book as the best non-fiction book of the year by a North Carolina author. Professor Akhil Amar of Yale Law School described Michael Curtis’s book “No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights” as “one of the most important and most impressive works of constitutional scholarship of the late twentieth century.” Professor Curtis has also received the Frank Porter Graham Award from the North Carolina Civil Liberties Union for achievement in defending and advancing civil liberties in North Carolina.