Breaking: NC Court Rejects Law Changing North Carolina Board of Elections to Help Republicans

Breaking: NC Court Rejects Law Changing North Carolina Board of Elections to Help Republicans

Posted on March 17, 2017 3:07 pm by Rick Hasen

A unanimous three-judge North Carolina state court, in a 43-page decision here, held that North Carolina’s attempt to change the nature of election boards in the state to help favor Republicans violates the state constitution. (The judges were not unanimous on other challenged laws.) It is a big win for voting rights.

There is little question that the Republican North Carolina legislature, facing a new Democratic governor, attempted to change the election laws for partisan reason. Under the existing law, the governor would have been able to have a majority on both the state election board and county boards. These boards have broken down on party lines on issues such as how much early voting to set (as noted in the court’s opinion). The new plan would have taken the Elections Board, broken it up into a separate elections and ethics board, given the legislature the power to appoint a number of the members, required that the members be equally divided among parties, given Republicans control of the boards in even-numbered (presidential and congressional) election years, and required that it would take a majority to do anything on the board. In the event of a partisan deadlock, default rules would kick in that would benefit Republicans, such as one early voting site per county, and only during business hours.

More at link.

http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91663

♡lmsp