Voting rights activists scored legal victories in key presidential election states Friday, the most important being a federal appeals court ruling that North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature enacted new voting restrictions in 2013 to intentionally blunt the growing clout of African American voters. 
 
 The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit was an overwhelming victory for the Justice Department and civil rights groups. Election law experts consider North Carolina’s voter law one of the nation’s most far-reaching. 
 
 In Wisconsin, where one federal judge already had eased restrictions on voter-ID requirements, a second judge found that additional elements of the law passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) were unconstitutional. 
 
 U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson suggested he would strike the entire law if he were not bound by the Supreme Court’s decision that states may use properly written voter-ID laws to guard against voter fraud. 
 
 “The evidence in this case casts doubt on the notion that voter ID laws foster integrity and confidence,” Peterson wrote. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.” The state will appeal both rulings. 
 
 This year more states than ever will require potential voters to show photo ID in order to vote in the election. Here's why this is so controversial. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post) 
 
 In the North Carolina case, the 4th Circuit panel agreed with allegations that North Carolina’s omnibus bill selectively chose voter-ID requirements, reduced the number of early-voting days and changed registration procedures in ways meant to harm blacks, who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party. 
 
 “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 the panel. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.” 
 
 [How North Carolina became the epicenter of the voting rights battle] 
 
 The rulings — along with that of a state court that halted an attempt in Kansas to require proof of citizenship to register — marked important wins for opponents of restrictive voting laws that are being challenged throughout the country ahead of November’s presidential election. Put together, the decisions suggest a growing judicial suspicion of the wave of voting-restriction legislation passed in recent years by ­Republican-led legislatures that said it was necessary to combat voter fraud. 
 
 The decisions are likely to prompt the states to ask the Supreme Court for emergency action. But it is far from clear whether the eight justices, evenly divided between conservative and liberal, would get involved. The proximity of an election is often reason for justices to let an appeals court ruling stand. 
 
 Federal courts have been examining what are popular and, to some, seemingly common-sense laws — requiring photo ID, for instance — to see whether they favor one group over another. 
 
 In North Carolina, for instance, the judges at oral arguments noted that government-issued driver’s licenses are an acceptable form of identification but that ­government-issued public assistance cards — used disproportionately by minorities in the state — are not. 
 
 Republican leaders in North Carolina vowed an appeal to the high court. They issued a fiery statement denouncing the ruling “by three partisan Democrats” and suggested it was intended to help the Democratic candidates for president and governor. 
 
 North Carolina is considered a key swing state, and African American voters have played an increasing role in making it competitive. 
 
 “We can only wonder if the intent is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and Roy Cooper to steal the election,” said Senate Leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore. 
 
 [The ‘smoking gun’ proving N.C. Republicans tried to disenfranchise blacks] 
 
 Motz, 73, was nominated by President Bill Clinton. The other judges on the panel were Henry Floyd, nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush and elevated to the 4th Circuit by President Obama, and James A. Wynn Jr., a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice nominated to the federal circuit by Obama. 
 
 Election law experts are skeptical there is evidence of widespread cheating at the polls in this country. In particular, they find that voting fraud is most often associated with absentee balloting, rather than the kind of impersonation voting that ID laws are meant to combat. 
 
 Speaking to reporters in Baton Rouge on Friday, U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch praised the court’s ruling and said the Justice Department will continue to challenge restrictive voting laws. “The ability of Americans to have a voice in the direction of their country — to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation — is fundamental to who we are and who we aspire to be,” Lynch said. 
 
 Democrats and civil rights groups have also filed suits in Ohio and Arizona. 
 
 
 
 The North Carolina decision by the Richmond-based court on Friday reverses a 485-page ruling by District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder that upheld the voting measures passed in 2013. 
 
 North Carolina lawmakers overhauled the state’s election law soon after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which freed certain states with a history of discrimination from a Voting Rights Act requirement that they receive federal approval before changing voting rules. North Carolina was one of the states. 
 
 Legislators quickly eliminated same-day voter registration, rolled back of a week of early voting and put an end to out-of-precinct voting. The appeals court’s ruling reinstates those provisions that civil rights groups, led by the state NAACP, said were used disproportionately by African American voters. 
 
 Motz wrote that Schroeder’s comprehensive examination of the legislature’s action “seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees. This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.” 
 
 The panel seemed to say it found the equivalent of a smoking gun. “Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” Motz wrote. “Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.” 
 
 The panel found the law was passed with racially discriminatory intent, violating the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. It said that “intentionally targeting a particular race’s access to the franchise because its members vote for a particular party, in a predictable manner, constitutes discriminatory purpose.” 
 
 Motz added: “Our conclusion does not mean, and we do not suggest, that any member of the General Assembly harbored racial hatred or animosity toward any minority group.” 
 
 But she said the “totality of the circumstances — North Carolina’s history of voting discrimination; the surge in African American voting; the legislature’s knowledge that African Americans voting translated into support for one party; and the swift elimination of the tools African Americans had used to vote and imposition of a new barrier at the first opportunity to do so — cumulatively and unmistakably reveal that the General Assembly used [the law] to entrench itself.” 
 
 “Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination,” Motz wrote. 
 
 Such a finding could have meant that the judges could order North Carolina back under federal supervision. But the panel declined to take that step, saying it was enough to block the parts of the law it found offensive. 
 
 [A recap of oral arguments before the 4th Circuit] 
 
 North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) issue a short statement that, like that of the legislative leaders, said the decision would be appealed, and he repeated claims about the partisan cast of the panel. “Three Democratic judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state,” said McCrory, who is in a tight reelection battle with Cooper, the state’s Democratic attorney general. 
 
 Voting rights advocates applauded the ruling and said it sent a strong message to legislatures throughout the country. 
 
 North Carolina was one of 17 states set to have more-restrictive voting laws in place for this presidential election than in 2012. Laws in several states, including Wisconsin, Texas and Virginia, also are being challenged in court. 
 
 [Appeals court says Texas voter-ID law discriminates against minorities] 
 
 In Wisconsin, a federal judge previously ruled that voters who lack the specific kind of identification the state requires be allowed to vote in November by signing an affidavit as to their identity. In a separate lawsuit, groups asked Peterson to rule on other aspects of the law. 
 
 He struck part of the law restricting hours for in-person voting before the election, saying it intentionally discriminates. “The legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans,” Peterson concluded. 
 
 In Texas, the entire U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Texas’s strict voter-ID law discriminates against minority voters, and it ordered a lower court to come up with a fix for the law in time for the November elections. 
 
 The appeals court, one of the most conservative in the country, declined to strike down the law completely but said provisions must be made to allow those who lack the specific ID the law requires to be able to cast a vote. The state has decided not to appeal that ruling to the Supreme Court, and a district judge is to rule soon on what accommodations must be made. ||||| Federal appellate judges on Friday struck down a 2013 law limiting voting options and requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls, declaring in an unsparing opinion that the restrictions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” 
 
 The three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the law was adopted with “discriminatory intent” despite lawmakers’ claims that the ID provision and other changes were designed to prevent voter fraud. 
 
 The ruling — which could have implications for voting laws in other states and possibly for the outcome of close races in the swing state of North Carolina — sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder, who in April issued a 485-page decision dismissing all claims in the legal challenge. 
 
 “In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” the ruling states. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.” 
 
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 The ruling prohibits North Carolina from requiring photo identification from voters in future elections, including the November 2016 general election. It restores a week of early voting and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and ensures that same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting will remain in effect. 
 
 State Board of Elections officials immediately began to pull back advertising campaigns that had been designed to air on TV, radio and other media in the coming months to educate North Carolina voters about what they would need to cast ballots in the coming election. 
 
 Challengers of the elections law overhaul shepherded through the Republican-led General Assembly in 2013 and signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory quickly lauded the ruling. Republican leaders criticized the ruling, noting that IDs are required to board airplanes, enter federal courthouses, cash checks and more. They announced their plans to appeal. 
 
 U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who leads the U.S. Justice Department that was a party in the lawsuit challenging the law, praised the appellate panel for striking down a law “that the court described in its ruling as ‘one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.’ ” Lynch described the law as one that placed “barriers between citizens and the ballot box.” 
 
 “And it sent a message that contradicted some of the most basic principles of our democracy,” Lynch said in her statement. “The ability of Americans to have a voice in the direction of their country – to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation – is fundamental to who we are and who we aspire to be. Going forward, the Department of Justice will continue our work to protect that sacred right for all.” 
 
 Read the court opinion 
 
 Lynch and many others echoed phrases from several lines in the 83-page ruling that bats back contentions by advocates of the law who claimed IDs were needed at the polls to prevent voter fraud. 
 
 “Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist,” the 4th Circuit judges wrote. 
 
 “This ruling is a stinging rebuke of the state’s attempt to undermine African-American voter participation, which had surged over the last decade,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “It is a major victory for North Carolina voters and for voting rights.” 
 
 N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, and state House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican from Cleveland County, issued a joint statement questioning the motives of the three-judge panel — Judge Diana Motz, a Bill Clinton appointee, Judge James A. Wynn Jr., a Barack Obama appointee, and Judge Henry F. Floyd, an Obama appointee to the 4th circuit bench but a George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. District bench. 
 
 “Since today’s decision by three partisan Democrats ignores legal precedent, ignores the fact that other federal courts have used North Carolina’s law as a model, and ignores the fact that a majority of other states have similar protections in place, we can only wonder if the intent is to reopen the door for voter fraud, potentially allowing fellow Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and Roy Cooper to steal the election. We will obviously be appealing this politically-motivated decision to the Supreme Court,” Berger and Moore said. 
 
 “The voter ID law ensures any North Carolina citizen who wants to vote will have that opportunity,” Berger and Moore contended. They pointed to provisions in state law that allow someone without ID to obtain a Division of Motor Vehicles card at no cost as well as offering people who have been unable to obtain one of the six acceptable forms of ID to cast a provisional ballot. 
 
 McCrory, in his statement, accused “three Democratic judges” of “undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state.” 
 
 Other voter ID rulings 
 
 North Carolina’s law is the third with an ID provision courts have rejected in the past two weeks. 
 
 A federal district judge found Wisconsin’s ID law too restrictive. The full 5th U.S. Circuit appeals court found that Texas’s voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act by making it more difficult for minorities to vote and opened the door for putting the state under federal supervision again. 
 
 “We applaud the appeals court for recognizing the discriminatory intent behind the monster voter suppression law,” Bob Hall, director of Democracy NC, a voting rights organization, said in a statement about the N.C. case. “The ruling makes clear that the North Carolina General Assembly cherry-picked the law to suppress African American and young voters because of the 2008 election. Today’s ruling begins to right that wrong.” 
 
 In North Carolina, the state could ask the full bench of the 4th Circuit to review the ruling. But attorneys and others speculate that even if the full court agreed to review the case, the 2013 election-law changes would not be restored before the November elections. 
 
 “Because of this ruling, North Carolinians will now be able to register and vote free of the obstacles created by the Legislature in 2013,” said Southern Coalition for Social Justice senior attorney Allison Riggs. 
 
 Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, questioned whether the law had been defended well. Though N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office represented lawmakers in the case, Republican leaders also hired private attorneys. 
 
 “This is an effort to overthrow the will of the people on voter ID and ballot security, and it is led by the Democrats and, we believe, by Roy Cooper, who did a really lackluster job of defending voter ID while at the same time publicly criticizing it,” Woodhouse said Friday afternoon. 
 
 But Cooper’s campaign noted that Cooper, the Democrat running for governor, had advised McCrory in 2013 to veto the bill. 
 
 North Carolinians were not the only ones commenting on the decision Friday. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, tweeted her support for the ruling. 
 
 Big victory for democracy as the 4th Circuit just struck down a NC voter discrimination law. Let’s keep fighting to make voting easier. -H — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 29, 2016 
 
 The Rev. William J. Barber II, fresh off of addressing the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, admonished lawmakers for changing North Carolina’s election laws that had made the state a “model for the nation in encouraging people to vote.” 
 
 Barber is president of the state NAACP that participated in the legal challenge, and the architect of the Moral Monday movement that has protested the voter ID law and other legislation from the Republican-controlled legislature and governor’s office. 
 
 “Today the 4th Circuit’s decision gives North Carolinians back an electoral system that allows the people of North Carolina to vote freely this fall,” Barber said in a statement. 
 
 In 2015, on the eve of the federal trial over the 2013 law, the legislature softened the ID requirement by adding a provison that allowed voters without acceptable ID to cast a provisional ballot if they could show a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining an ID. 
 
 Though Motz differed from Wynn and Floyd on whether the time was right to weigh the “reasonable impediment” option, Wynn wrote for the majority: “Nothing in this record shows that the reasonable impediment exception ensures that the photo ID law no longer imposes any lingering burden on African American voters.” 
 
 That could be significant for Texas and Wisconsin, where such a softening of the ID requirement was suggested, too, lawyers said. 
 
 “This is a very big win for voting rights plaintiffs and the DOJ,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine who writes about law and politics on his electionlawblog.org. ||||| AP Photo Court strikes down North Carolina voter ID law 
 
 A federal appeals court has struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law, holding that it was “passed with racially discriminatory intent.” 
 
 The ruling also invalidated limits the same state law placed in 2013 on early voting, same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 The three judges assigned to the case — all Democratic appointees — were unanimous that the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature violated the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act three years ago by enacting the measure requiring voters to show certain types of photo ID at the polls. 
 
 "The record makes clear that the historical origin of the challenged provisions in this statute is not the innocuous back-and-forth of routine partisan struggle that the State suggests and that the district court accepted," Judge Diana Motz wrote on behalf of Judges James Wynn and Henry Floyd. "Rather, the General Assembly enacted them in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting. The district court clearly erred in ignoring or dismissing this historical background evidence, all of which supports a finding of discriminatory intent." 
 
 The court's opinion bluntly described the legislation as a clear effort to suppress the black vote. 
 
 "We cannot ignore the record evidence that, because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history," Motz added. 
 
 The state could seek to appeal the decision to the full bench of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals or to the Supreme Court, but it seems unlikely those courts will step in to restore the voter ID law and other voting-related changes in advance of the November election. 
 
 While the appeals court panel was unanimous on the motivations behind the law, Motz dissented in part from the remedy the appeals court ordered. She noted that the state loosened the photo-ID requirement a bit in 2015 by allowing voters without acceptable ID to vote if they signed an affidavit saying they had a "reasonable impediment" to getting one. 
 
 Motz — an appointee of President Bill Clinton — said that rather rather than a permanent injunction against the law, she would have imposed a temporary ban on the photo ID requirement. 
 
 However, Wynn and Floyd — both appointees of President Barack Obama — said the discriminatory intent of the 2013 version tainted the photo-ID requirement even as modified and they ordered the district court to block the measure permanently. 
 
 "Nothing in this record shows that the reasonable impediment exception ensures that the photo ID law no longer imposes any lingering burden on African American voters," Wynn wrote. 
 
 A spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling and the state's likely next steps. 
 
 The Obama Administration was among those urging the appeals court to invalidate the North Carolina law. 
 
 Attorney General Loretta Lynch hailed the ruling Friday, pointing to its description of the law as "one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history." 
 
 "This law was passed with discriminatory intent. It targeted African-Americans 'with almost surgical precision' – imposing stringent ID requirements, reducing same-day registration and constraining out-of-precinct voting to place barriers between citizens and the ballot box. And it sent a message that contradicted some of the most basic principles of our democracy," Lynch said in a statement. "The ability of Americans to have a voice in the direction of their country – to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation – is fundamental to who we are and who we aspire to be." 
 
 The 4th Circuit ruling also delivered a harsh rebuke to U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder, who issued a mammoth, 485-page decision in April upholding the law. Motz suggested Schroeder had ample evidence of racial bias in front of him, but failed to put the pieces together. 
 
 "The district court clearly erred" when it found a lack of discriminatory intent and when it deemed North Carolina's interests in passing the law to be compelling, she wrote. "This error resulted from the court’s consideration of each piece of evidence in a vacuum, rather than engaging in the totality of the circumstances analysis required....Any individual piece of evidence can seem innocuous when viewed alone, but gains an entirely different meaning when considered in context."
– A restrictive 2013 North Carolina voter ID law was struck down for being passed with "racially discriminatory intent," Politico reports. Three federal appeals court judges ruled unanimously Friday that the law violated both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. Judge Diana Motz says North Carolina lawmakers passed the new voting restrictions "in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting." According to the Charlotte Observer, North Carolina voters will no longer be required to show a photo ID when voting, and 16- and 17-year-olds can once again pre-register to vote. The ruling also brought back a week of early voting, the Washington Post reports. The ACLU points out that all of the practices, including out-of-precinct voting, done away with by the 2013 law—and brought back by Friday's ruling—are ones "disproportionately used by African-Americans." In 2014, the law kept 12,000 people from registering to vote on election day and tossed out 1,600 ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct. Seventeen states moved to have stricter voting laws in the wake of high African-American voter turnout in 2012. Three of those laws—Texas, Wisconsin, and now North Carolina—have been struck down this month. North Carolina can appeal the ruling to a higher court, but that's unlikely to change anything before November's election.