Attorney General Eric Holder is a smart man. He knows his lawsuit against North Carolina is nonsense. So why is he doing it? JLF’s John Hood strips bare the Holder plan.
You might think the plan is to get the federal judiciary to strike down North Carolina’s new voter-ID requirement and other election changes. I doubt that Holder and his legal team have such an unrealistic goal. They know, even if liberal writers and activists in North Carolina don’t, that the U.S. Supreme Court has recently upheld voter ID. Under the prevailing understanding of federal law, such requirements are not the equivalent of poll taxes and do not constitute an infringement of the right to vote.
The lawsuit’s prospect aren’t much better on the other challenged provisions, including changes to early voting, voter registration, and out-of-precinct voting. There are no federally enforceable rights to vote early, register on the same day you vote, or cast a ballot in a precinct other than your own. If such rights existed, most of the country — including deep-blue states such as New York that have no early voting or same-day registration — would be guilty of voter suppression. No one, including the president and his attorney general, truly believes this.
Moreover, Eric Holder’s claims about North Carolina’s new law are uninformed. For example, it doesn’t reduce the opportunity to cast early ballots. Instead, it provides the same number of hours of early voting as before but does so during a 10-day window rather than a 17-day window. And to insist that voters go to the proper precinct to vote is not only in the interest of smooth elections administration but also in the interest of the relocated voters themselves, who would otherwise be blocked from voting in some district or local races that an out-of-precinct provisional ballot wouldn’t contain.
At best, the Obama administration may hope to beat North Carolina at the trial court, delaying implementation of the new law until the decision is reversed on appeal. I think it is more likely, however, that the goal isn’t legal at all. It’s electoral.
