Taking advantage of a recent Supreme Court decision North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory signed in to law a massive voting reform bill that cuts down the early voting period and enforces strict photo identification requirements; within hours civil rights groups had filed lawsuits against the law, according to CBS News.
"Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection of our right to vote," McCrory said in a statement. "While some will try to make this seem to be controversial, the simple reality is that requiring voters to provide a photo ID when they vote is a common sense idea."
Critics of the law say that it unfairly targets groups that tend to vote for Democrats including minorities, the elderly and younger voters. North Carolina will become the 13th state to pass a law requiring photo ID of voters since the 2010 mid-term elections. Twelve of the 13 states to do so were controlled by a Republican governor and legislature or overruled a Democratic governor's veto in order to pass the law, according to CBS News.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in June to remove the part of the Voting Rights Act that required federal approval to change voting laws in certain states that were deemed to have a history of discrimination North Carolina is the first state to approve new voting laws. Four states - Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina - had passed voting laws prior to the ruling that were caught up in litigation. Once the Supreme Court ruling came down those laws went into place, according to CBS News.
The law will not only require voters to have a government issued photo ID with them at the time of the election but it also cuts down the early voting period by a week. The law eliminates same-day voter registration, which had been the norm in North Carolina, and requires voters to be registered 25 days prior to an election. The law also gets rid of a high school program that signs kids up to vote upon their 18th birthday, according to Politico.
In addition to changing the way elections will be held in the Tar Heel state the law also changes campaign finance regulations. The law does away with requirements to disclose the source of political ads and allows for political parties to take in unlimited corporate donations, according to Politico.
"It is a trampling on the blood, sweat and tears of the martyrs - black and white - who fought for voting rights in this country," Rev. William Barber, president of North Carolina's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said. "It puts McCrory on the wrong side of history."
The NAACP is joined by the American Civil Liberties Union in filing suit against the new law. The lawsuits focus on the elimination of early voting and the end of same-day registration, according to Fox News.
"Eliminating a huge part of early voting will cut off voting opportunities for hundreds of thousands of citizens," Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, told CBS News. "It will turn Election Day into a mess, shoving more voters into even longer lines. Florida similarly eliminated a week of early voting before the 2012 election, and we all know how that turned out - voters standing in line for hours, some having to wait until after the President's acceptance speech to finally vote, and hundreds of thousands giving up in frustration.
"Those burdens fell disproportionately on African-American voters, and the same thing will happen in North Carolina. We should be making it easier for people to vote, not harder."
