Leading Off
●North Carolina: In late January, North Carolina's Supreme Court delivered a major victory for voting rights when it struck down a law that Republican legislators had passed in 2017 to remove the Democratic majority from state and county election boards. This law sought to create new boards with an equal number of members from each party under the guise of partisan fairness, but its real purpose was to give Republicans veto power over Democratic efforts to undo GOP voter suppression efforts put in place when Republicans held majorities. (Funny how they didn’t have a problem with that setup back then.)
Campaign ActionRepublicans had intended this law to create partisan deadlocks so that Democrats couldn't overturn GOP cuts to early voting and restore polling places that had been removed from Democratic-leaning places like college campuses and heavily black neighborhoods. Most dangerously, this law would have had counties default to the statutory minimum of a single early voting location if a county board couldn't agree on a full-fledged early voting plan. That would have enabled Republicans to force heavily populated Democratic counties to rely on just one early voting site, producing hours-long voting lines that discourage voter turnout.
This recent ruling marks the second time that a state court has thrown out this attempted Republican power grab. The GOP initially passed a law to achieve the same ends shortly after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper defeated McCrory in 2016, but a court held that if Republican legislators had the authority to make appointments to the boards, as they sought, that would violate the separation of powers. The GOP’s second effort attempted to circumvent this ruling by forcing the governor to appoint an equal number of members of both parties from a list of names selected by the parties themselves, but the state Supreme Court decided that this also ran afoul of the separation of powers.
Importantly, this latest decision, which fell along party lines, was only possible because Democrats gained a one-seat majority on the state Supreme Court in 2016. Unfortunately for Cooper, the court did not immediately lift a stay that has prevented the governor from making new appointments to the state board. However, this ruling will almost certainly mean that Cooper can finally appoint a Democratic majority ahead of the 2018 elections and use that power to expand access to voting.