RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Two North Carolina constitutional amendments approved by voters — including a photo voter identification mandate — are enforceable, a trial court panel ruled three years after appeals judges declared they could be nullified because state lawmakers who helped put them on 2018 ballots came from districts tainted by illegal racial bias.
A panel of three Superior Court judges agreed late last week with GOP legislative leaders who wanted dismissed a lawsuit that focused on whether certain legislative actions could be voided if enough General Assembly members elected from racially gerrymandered districts swayed the outcome. The amendment referendums were put on the ballot through bills approved in part by lawmakers elected from nearly 30 districts struck down by federal courts as illegal gerrymanders.
The state Supreme Court ruled in August 2022 — when Democrats held a 4-3 seat majority — that canceling such referendum initiations was possible. But it said a trial judge who initially voided the two approved amendments in early 2019 needed to gather more evidence on the particulars. Along with the voter ID requirements, a majority of voters also approved an amendment lowering the cap on income tax rates from 10% to 7%.
The party-line majority opinion in 2022 said the initial judge had to evaluate whether leaving the amendments in place would allow improperly elected legislators to escape accountability, further exclude voters from the democratic process or amount to continued discrimination. If the answer to any is yes, the justices said, an amendment must be invalidated.
Over the next three years, however, the case was transferred to a three-judge panel. While attorneys for the state NAACP, the lawsuit plaintiff, asked that the panel order the two sides to accumulate evidence for a hearing the Supreme Court directed occur, the GOP legislators’ lawyers said there was already enough information from legal briefs for the panel to rule in their favor. The three judges listened to those arguments in October 2024.
The panel’s unanimous order, issued Friday, said the state NAACP failed to “meet its burden of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt” that the General Assembly passed the voter ID and income tax cap amendments with ”discriminatory intent and that the legislation actually produces a meaningful disparate impact along racial lines.” The panel was composed of two registered Republicans and one Democrat.
Spokespeople for Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall didn’t immediately respond to an email request for comment Monday. Tim Moore was speaker when the 2018 amendments were approved for the ballot.
The ruling can be appealed, and the measure could end up back at the state Supreme Court, where five of the seven current justices are registered Republicans.
The state NAACP is discussing next steps, according to group attorney Kym Meyer, who on Monday lamented that the trial-judge panel failed to conduct more fact finding.
“We are dismayed that three years later, the lower court has failed to do what the Supreme Court directed,” Meyer wrote in an email.
The three-judge panel also pointed out the same session of the legislature approved a law in December 2018 — weeks after the amendment was approved — that determined how photo voter ID would be implemented. The requirement has been used in elections since 2023. And earlier in 2023, the state Supreme Court — now with a Republican majority — upheld that voter ID implementation law that Democratic colleagues previously struck down as racially biased.
“To retroactively invalidate the session law enabling the Voter ID Amendment would entrench chaos and confusion especially when the Voter ID Law was upheld by the Supreme Court,” the three-judge panel read.
As for the income tax cap, they wrote, the trial judge’s 2019 order that initially blocked both amendments, stating that a lower tax rate could harm people of color, was “at best, a speculative forecast of a disparate impact along racial lines.”
