Judicial Watch: Supreme Court Blocks Elections Board Law

In a hopeful sign for the future of voting rights in North Carolina, the NC Supreme Court last week stepped in to block a law that would almost certainly have produced draconian cuts to early voting opportunities.

The Court reinstated a preliminary injunction against the law that would have transferred effective control of the state and county election boards from the governor to the legislature. The current legislative majority leaders support shrinking early voting opportunities. Under the blocked law, all county early voting plans would default to a low minimum number of hours and just one site, unless three-quarters of that county’s board of elections agreed to a more extensive plan. Since under the same law, the legislature would appoint half of each board; this would have guaranteed control of the process to policy-makers committed to shrinking voting rights.

Those are the same leaders who also attempted to eliminate same-day registration and voting during the early voting period. They tried to institute a photo ID requirement for voting that would make it harder for hundreds of thousands of NC citizens without drivers licenses to vote at all. Both of those changes were among the ones blocked by federal courts in a different, earlier lawsuit.

The action by the NC Supreme Court capped a see-saw legal battle which flipped outcomes at each stage of judicial review. Gov. Cooper won a major interim court victory in January. That’s when a bipartisan panel of Superior Court judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the NC Supreme Court granted the governor’s request to put the law on hold while waiting for the trial on that law’s constitutionality.

However, a panel of the Republican-dominated state Appeals Court last week reversed the first order, allowing the law to go into effect pending trial. With the decision by the state Supreme Court to override the Appeals Court and reinstate the injunction, it appears likely that the law (passed as part of the December special session’s HB 4) will remain on hold while a full trial is heard.

As we observed last week, this dispute is of major significance to environmental advocates like NCLCV. The long-term strategy of NCLCV and other environmental advocates depends on effectively encouraging more—not less—public participation in voting to hold legislators responsible for their environmental policies.

In another state court decision of environmental significance last week, the same special panel of Superior Court judges who put the elections board changes law on hold reconsidered their earlier decision to block legislative hearings on Cooper’s cabinet head appointments. However, the panel said at the same time that lawyers for Cooper could re-file his request for a hold on the law if the State Senate tried to block an appointment before the full hearing on the challenge to that law is held. Since that hearing begins on March 7 (and Cooper doesn’t have to submit nominees for the Senate’s consideration under the law until May), the situation is unlikely to change before then.

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