The Department of Justice is currently suing North Carolina over its new voting rules, claiming racial discrimination. Attorney General Eric Holder made the announcement on Monday, and commented that the effect of this law would be to “restrict access and ease of voter participation,” according to Find Law. The attorney general went on then comment that the ideals of this nation would be inconsistent with policy that would “disproportionately exclude minority voters.”
North Carolina’s new law tightens the voting period for early voting, and has strict identification requirements. It is among five other southern states to adopt stricter voting ID. The DOJ sued the state of Texas regarding this same ID law, and is also looking to intersect Texas’s “redistricting laws,” as certain groups find them discriminatory.
Because of voter fraud, lawmakers in the south insist on strict identification for voters. Republicans support the act, while Democrats say that the tougher laws “are intended to make voting more difficult for minorities and students, voting groups that lean toward democrats, in states with legacies of poll taxes and literacy tests.”
The federal government is challenging a provision in the new law that would force voters to show government-issued ID at the polls if they want to vote. In North Carolina, a state board of elections survey showed that “hundreds of thousands of registered voters did not have a state-issued ID, and that many of them were young, black, poor or elderly.”