Courts Strike Down Voter Restriction Laws That Target Black People With "Surgical Precision"

Voting rights advocates have won a number of major victories that could reshape the November election. Over the past 10 days, a series of court rulings have struck down new voting restrictions in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas and Texas. In North Carolina, judge Diana Motz wrote, “We cannot ignore the recent evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.” Meanwhile in Wisconsin, US District Judge James Peterson also struck down a voting rights law, writing that the objective of the law was to “suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.” A week earlier, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down a Texas law which has been described as the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law. For more, we speak with Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation, where he covers voting rights. Berman’s recent piece for The Nation is called “The Country’s Worst Anti-Voting Law Was Just Struck Down in North Carolina.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Voting rights advocates have won a number of major victories that could reshape the November election. Over the past 10 days, a series of court rulings have struck down new voting restrictions in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas and Texas. On Friday, a US appeals court struck down a North Carolina law that required voters to show photo identification, scaled back early voting, ended out-of-precinct voting and prevented residents from registering to vote on Election Day. In a remarkable judgment, the three-judge panel found North Carolina’s law targeted African Americans, quote, “with almost surgical precision,” unquote. The judge found the legislators wrote the law after requesting data that showed African Americans disproportionately used early voting in both 2008 and 2012. Judge Diana Motz wrote, quote, “We cannot ignore the recent evidence that,…

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