In light of the response that my post/letter to the editor generated, some additional thoughts.
North Carolina’s restrictive voting law imposed voter-ID requirements, reduced the number of early-voting days, and changed registration procedures in ways meant to harm African-Americans’ right to vote.
“The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that struck down the law for violating the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”
A recent study looked at around a billion ballots cast in the United States from 2000 through 2014 and found only 31 instances of impersonation fraud at the polls.
Mr. Trump is not alone in relying on ungrounded assertions of voter fraud. Republican-dominated state legislatures have passed restrictive voter-ID laws in approximately 20 states since the 2010 election.
