A North Carolina voting law was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, barring same-day registration and invalidating Election Day ballots cast in the wrong precinct.
According to MSNBC, a majority of the justices ordered those provisions be unblocked after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted them. A full trial on the voting law is scheduled for mid-2015.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the other seven justices for the order.
"The Court of Appeals determined that at least two of the measures — elimination of same-day registration and termination of out-of-precinct voting — risked significantly reducing opportunities for black voters to exercise the franchise in violation of [section] 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I would not displace that record-based reasoned judgment," Ginsburg wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor.
State Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, who helped pass the law,
told The Associated Press that, "The law is reasonable, fair, and treats all people the same."
State NAACP President Rev. William Barber, whose organization brought one of three lawsuits challenging the laws, said that, "Eliminating these measures will cause irreparable harm of denying citizens their right to vote in the November election — a right that, once lost, can never be recovered."
According to The Wall Street Journal, "In 2008 more than half (51.6 percent) of unregistered voters said they were 'not interested or refused' to register, according to a Census Bureau report. About two-thirds (67.7 percent) of those who were registered but didn’t vote said they were 'not interested' or 'did not like' the candidates (26.4 percent), 'too busy' (17.6 percent), or 'ill or disabled' (14.9 percent). Just 6 percent cited 'registration problems.'"
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