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One plaintiffs' attorney said the ruling "makes our democracy better and ensures that North Carolina is not able to unjustly criminalize innocent individuals with felony convictions who are valued members of our society."
Democracy defenders on Tuesday hailed a ruling from a U.S. federal judge striking down a 19th-century North Carolina law criminalizing people who vote while on parole, probation, or post-release supervision due to a felony conviction.
In Monday's decision, U.S. District Judge Loretta C. Biggs—an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama—sided with the North Carolina A. Philip Randolph Institute and Action NC, who argued that the 1877 law discriminated against Black people.
"The challenged statute was enacted with discriminatory intent, has not been cleansed of its discriminatory taint, and continues to disproportionately impact Black voters," Biggs wrote in her 25-page ruling.
Therefore, according to the judge, the 1877 law violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause.
"We are ecstatic that the court found in our favor and struck down this racially discriminatory law that has been arbitrarily enforced over time," Action NC executive director Pat McCoy said in a statement. "We will now be able to help more people become civically engaged without fear of prosecution for innocent mistakes. Democracy truly won today!"
Voting rights tracker Democracy Docket noted that Monday's ruling "does not have any bearing on North Carolina's strict felony disenfranchisement law, which denies the right to vote for those with felony convictions who remain on probation, parole, or a suspended sentence—often leaving individuals without voting rights for many years after release from incarceration."
However, Mitchell Brown, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, said that "Judge Biggs' decision will help ensure that voters who mistakenly think they are eligible to cast a ballot will not be criminalized for simply trying to reengage in the political process and perform their civic duty."
"It also makes our democracy better and ensures that North Carolina is not able to unjustly criminalize innocent individuals with felony convictions who are valued members of our society, specifically Black voters who were the target of this law," Brown added.
North Carolina officials have not said whether they will appeal Biggs' ruling. The state Department of Justice said it was reviewing the decision.
According to Forward Justice—a nonpartisan law, policy, and strategy center dedicated to advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the U.S. South, "Although Black people constitute 21% of the voting-age population in North Carolina, they represent 42% of the people disenfranchised while on probation, parole, or post-release supervision."
The group notes that in 44 North Carolina counties, "the disenfranchisement rate for Black people is more than three times the rate of the white population."
"Judge Biggs' decision will help ensure that voters who mistakenly think they are eligible to cast a ballot will not be criminalized for simply trying to re-engage in the political process and perform their civic duty."
In what one civil rights leader called "the largest expansion of voting rights in this state since the 1965 Voting Rights Act," a three-judge state court panel voted 2-1 in 2021 to restore voting rights to approximately 55,000 formerly incarcerated felons. The decision made North Carolina the only Southern state to automatically restore former felons' voting rights.
Republican state legislators appealed that ruling to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which in 2022 granted their request for a stay—but only temporarily, as the court allowed a previous injunction against any felony disenfranchisement based on fees or fines to stand.
However, last April the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the three-judge panel decision, stripping voting rights from thousands of North Carolinians previously convicted of felonies. Dissenting Justice Anita Earls opined that "the majority's decision in this case will one day be repudiated on two grounds."
"First, because it seeks to justify the denial of a basic human right to citizens and thereby perpetuates a vestige of slavery, and second, because the majority violates a basic tenant of appellate review by ignoring the facts as found by the trial court and substituting its own," she wrote.
As similar battles play out in other states, Democratic U.S. lawmakers led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont in December introduced legislation to end former felon disenfranchisement in federal elections and guarantee incarcerated people the right to vote.
Currently, only Maine, Vermont, and the District of Columbia allow all incarcerated people to vote behind bars.
"After Roe v. Wade was overturned, we had to turn to state courts and state constitutions as the critical backstop to protecting access to abortion," said one advocate. "And the stakes are unbelievably high."
Two key state supreme court races in 2023 showed that Americans "are beginning to understand that state courts can serve as a firewall for our democracy," said an official at a national grassroots advocacy group in an op-ed Thursday—but the energy voters brought the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Supreme Court races, she warned, must spread nationwide in 2024 in order to safeguard Americans' "fundamental freedoms."
At The Fulcrum, Stand Up America's deputy communications director, Sarah Harris, wrote that about a quarter of all state supreme court justices will be on ballots in November due to term limits, mandatory elections, and retirements. Voters in 33 states are set to decide who should sit on top courts.
"Americans can't afford to elect judges who are unwilling to state their position on democracy issues, or risk further assaults on our right to vote and our right to reproductive healthcare," wrote Harris. "Wisconsin and Pennsylvania voters have set a commendable example, highlighting that the strength of our democracy rests in the hands of those who actively engage in its preservation."
In Wisconsin, Justice Janet Protasiewicz won her state supreme court seat last April in an election that inspired the state's highest-ever turnout for an off-election year judicial race. Supporters of the Democratic judge highlighted her strong backing of abortion rights, voting access, and worker protections, and noted that a Democratic majority on the state's high court could decide whether former President Donald Trump would be able to challenge the 2024 election results, as he attempted to in 2020.
Voters in Ohio and Michigan are among those who face similarly high stakes this year, Harris said. In the former state, two Democratic judges and one Republican are up for reelection to a court that currently has a 4-3 majority favoring the GOP.
"The state Supreme Court is going to be the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the new constitutional amendment that the people voted for and organized around... That is a huge amount of power."
Voters turned out in droves in November to pass a constitutional amendment affirming that Ohioans have the right to make their own reproductive health decisions, including whether to obtain abortion care.
More than 30 abortion restrictions are in place in the state, and challenges to them could end up before Ohio's top court, making the state supreme court race "very high-stakes," Jessie Hill, a law professor and consultant for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, toldThe Associated Press last week.
"The state Supreme Court is going to be the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the new constitutional amendment that the people voted for and organized around," Hill told the outlet. "That is a huge amount of power."
"We saw an incredible number of voters come out to vote on that amendment and an incredible amount of investment in those campaigns," Hill added. "I think we'll see a similar attention and investment in Ohio."
In Michigan, where the high court has a 4-3 Democratic majority and two judges on the 2024 ballot—one from each party—victories for the GOP could also allow a new conservative majority to reverse several pro-abortion rights laws passed in 2023.
"After Roe v. Wade was overturned, we had to turn to state courts and state constitutions as the critical backstop to protecting access to abortion," Brigitte Amiri, deputy director at the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, told the AP. "And the stakes are unbelievably high in each of these cases in each of these states."
The results of this year's state court races could also have implications for redistricting efforts, which the Republican State Leadership Committee told the AP it is focusing on heavily, calling the state supreme courts the "last line of defense against far-left national groups."
Republicans are hoping to expand their 5-2 majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court, which last year reversed a previous ruling on a redistricting case and allowed political gerrymandering, giving the GOP an electoral edge.
"Voters' increased attention on state supreme court races is a direct response to Republican-led efforts to restrict access to the ballot and overturn the will of the voters in 2020," Harris wrote at The Fulcrum. "Americans are also paying closer attention to the courts after key U.S. Supreme Court decisions left reproductive justice and voting rights in the hands of state legislatures."
"Right now," she added, "the electorate is demanding justices who uphold the democratic process and rule on cases without a partisan agenda."
"Mountain Valley Pipeline and its Southgate extension have been poorly conceived from the beginning, but today some of the communities in harm's way can breathe easier," said one campaigner.
Frontline critics of the Mountain Valley Pipeline celebrated after Equitrans Midstream revealed Friday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the distance of the proposed Southgate extension project has been cut in half.
The partially completed MVP project—long delayed by legal battles until congressional Republicans and President Joe Biden included language to fast-track it in a debt limit deal earlier this year—is set to cross 303 miles of Virginia and West Virginia.
The MVP Southgate extension into North Carolina was supposed to be 75 miles, but the filing details plans for a redesigned 31-mile gas project that "would include substantially fewer water crossings and would not require a new compressor station."
Responding to the development Friday evening, Denali Nalamalapu, communications director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights Coalition, said that "despite receiving a free pass from the federal government, the MVP continues to crumble before our eyes. For nearly 10 years, communities along the route have declared this project impossible and deadly. Now, after meeting with its clients, we see further admission from MVP that they can't follow through with the foolhardy plan they set out with."
"This news is a win for the movement that will be celebrated by emboldened resistance in the new year."
"This news is a hard-won movement victory: Fewer people will be harmed now that the Southgate extension plan has been halved," she stressed. "The MVP has always known it poses a horrific danger to the communities along the route—but their bottom line takes priority."
"With this new plan, the company admits that fewer waterways will be harmed and a compressor station will be avoided, gesturing towards the devastating water pollution, air pollution, and health impacts it will and has caused," she added. "This news is a win for the movement that will be celebrated by emboldened resistance in the new year."
Appalachian Voices Virginia field coordinator Jessica Sims also welcomed the news as a win for communities on the frontlines of the climate-wrecking gas project.
"Mountain Valley Pipeline and its Southgate extension have been poorly conceived from the beginning, but today some of the communities in harm's way can breathe easier," Sims said Saturday. "We know these changes resulted from sustained opposition to this unnecessary methane gas pipeline and its Southgate extension, and our opposition continues."
The new Equitrans Midstream filing follows a pair of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) orders last week, one that allows MVP to raise gas transportation rates and another that extends the timeline to build the extension.
"The recent decision by FERC to extend Southgate's federal certificate was dependent on the pipeline having a contract with another entity to buy the gas," Appalachian Voices North Carolina program manager Ridge Graham noted Saturday.
"With a wholly new project that requires an 'open season' to find customers," Graham argued, "FERC should cancel the original Southgate Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity and send the developers back to the drawing board."
With MVP opponents "facing increased repression from the state and the companies behind the pipeline," another group that has spent years battling the project, Appalachians Against Pipelines, is calling for solidarity actions across the United States January 29-31 "to bring the fight to every company and bank involved."