EDITORIAL
With the presidential election cycle experiencing unprecedented chaos, it was good news last week for African-American voters when the U.S. Appeals Court struck down a North Carolina law that required a photo identification when casting ballots.
This decision is clearly a victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton because it will allow Black voters, who favor her candidacy, easier access to the polls to cast their votes.
North Carolina is a critical swing state, and like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, could be decisive in determining the outcome in the race against Donald Trump, her Republican opponent.
Yes, there is reason to celebrate the decision in North Carolina, where provisions of the law had practically eliminated early voting, prevented residents from registering and voting on the same day and curtailed voters from exercising their franchise outside of their assigned districts.
We wholeheartedly agree with Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, who said, the “ruling [in North Carolina] is a stinging rebuke of the state’s attempt to undermine African-American voter participation, which had surged over the last decade.”
A similar decision to eliminate voting ID provisions was struck down last week in Wisconsin. There, a federal judge ruled that portions of the state’s voter ID law passed by a Republican-controlled legislature were unconstitutional. Like the ruling in North Carolina, the judge in Wisconsin ruled that the voter ID laws disenfranchised minority voters.
Good news on voter ID laws is coming from Texas, Kansas, North Dakota and Michigan, all of which bodes well for the advocates against voter suppression.
We await the ramifications of these rulings in other states that have voter ID laws, largely created to guard against voter fraud, whose premise has no basis in reality. Of the millions of voters nationwide, there has not even been a handful of incidents of voter identity fraud.
Such a measure was put into effect to provide the Republican Party candidates an advantage in certain districts with a majority African-American voting population.
If the laws and voting provisions in North Carolina, for example, had been allowed to stand, nearly 30,000 voters would have been disenfranchised this coming November.
Voter suppression has long been a troubling factor for the American electorate, particularly for African- Americans. And we are pleased to see that the spate of recent decisions will eliminate these carryovers from the Jim Crow era.
Of course, there is much more to be done, but at least we have some semblance of change, some indications that the rights guaranteed by the constitution will also mean that Black lives matter when it comes to participating in the election process.
The recent decisions will certainly favor Clinton, but that is not the most critical concern here. Black Americans, no matter the candidates, need to have their rights as citizens never reduced to a second-class status, and that is what voter suppression is all about.