In a critical victory for fair elections and the rule of law, North Carolina voters have elected civil rights crusader Anita Earls as the next Democratic justice of the state Supreme Court. Just as importantly, voters overwhelmingly rejected two deceptively written constitutional amendments that Republicans had put on the ballot so they could pack that very same court to stop it from curtailing their worst-in-the-nation gerrymandering and voter suppression. Furthermore, voters rejected Republican legislators' ploy to usurp Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's power to appoint the state Board of Elections in their quest to prevent Democrats from expanding early voting.
Indeed, Earls' victory over GOP Justice Barbara Jackson, which was astonishingly aided by a GOP election-rigging scheme blowing up in their faces, expands the Democratic majority to five seats over just two Republicans. And because voters rejected an amendment that would have effectively gerrymandered the judicial branch by letting the GOP-gerrymandered legislature assume Cooper’s authority to fill judicial vacancies, Republicans can’t use their unconstitutionally gerrymandered supermajorities to pack the state Supreme Court in a December lame-duck legislative session and return it to a Republican majority as they had planned.
Nevertheless, Tuesday wasn't a complete victory for North Carolina voting rights, since voters approved the GOP's photo voter ID amendment by an 11-point margin. Republicans will hold a lame-duck session before losing their power to override Cooper's expected veto, and it's likely that they will craft the voter ID requirement in a suppressive fashion, just like their invalidated 2013 voter ID statute that a federal court struck down for targeting black voters "with almost surgical precision."
However, now that Earls, a civil rights lawyer who has fought and won cases against out-of-control North Carolina Republicans on gerrymandering and voting rights, will soon sit on the bench, the end of this decade’s GOP efforts to eviscerate democracy may finally be in sight. That’s because Earls and her fellow Democratic justices could use North Carolina's state constitutional guarantee of "free" elections to deem gerrymandering unconstitutional, following the lead of Pennsylvania's Democratic Supreme Court, and they could even mitigate the damage of voter ID by relying on the the state constitution's right to vote.
Most importantly, because the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to let such rulings stand due to federalism, North Carolina elections could become much freer and fairer as soon as 2020.
Source DailyKos
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