As the presidential election tightens and polls show Trump and Clinton within a few points of each other in North Carolina, Republican Gov. Pat McCrory has appealed the Supreme Court to reinstate previous voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, according to NBC News. This comes in the wake of numerous voter-ID laws throughout the country being struck down in the courts this past month.
It's also become an even more partisan issue to limit early voting, which favors African-American voters, as over 60 percent of their votes came from early voting in 2008. The GOP-led election board is now looking for ways to limit access to early voting and voting on Sundays.
From the NBC News report:
On Sunday, Dallas Woodhouse, the chair of the state GOP, emailed Republican county election board members, asking them to "make party line changes to early voting," including reducing hours, not offering Sunday voting, and not putting polling sites on college campuses..."Many of our folks are angry and are opposed to Sunday voting for a host of reasons including respect for voter's religious preferences, protection of our families and allowing the fine election staff a day off, rather than forcing them to work days on end without time off," Woodhouse wrote in the email. "Six days of voting in one week is enough. Period."
The federal court that struck down North Carolina's voter-ID law 3-0 last month ruled that the law was illegal because it was “passed with racially discriminatory intent.” The Rev. William J. Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach and leader of North Carolina's Moral Monday protests, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, activist and coauthor with Barber The Third Reconstruction, have since 2013 called the original effort "a monster voter suppression bill" that subverts democracy with a new Southern Strategy.
Earlier this year, writing on about the "Second Career of James Crow, Esq.," Barber and Wilson-Hartgrove posited:
... this case is about much more than defeating voter ID laws. It is about a central question of 21st-century American politics: is a multiethnic democracy possible?
It remains to be seen.
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