A federal appeals court ruled against national and state Republicans in a challenge to 225,000 voter registrations in North Carolina, reversing a lower court’s ruling sending the challenge back to state court.
The challenge will now remain in federal court, where it faces steep odds, after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit unanimously decided that it was “improper” for a district judge to send Republicans’ claim back to state court, where it was first brought.
North Carolina election officials and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which intervened in the case, moved the GOP challenge to federal court and asked the district judge to dismiss two GOP claims. The district court dismissed a statutory claim but said it did not have jurisdiction to rule on the constitutional one.
“Here, the State Board refused to perform Plaintiffs’ requested act — striking certain registered voters from North Carolina’s voter rolls — on the ground that doing so within 90 days of a federal election would violate … the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” Judge Nicole Berner wrote in the panel’s opinion.
“These are ‘law[s] providing for equal rights,'” she continued, citing a statute that allows removal in such instances. “We thus reverse the district court’s remand order and return this matter to the district court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and North Carolina Republican Party asked the courts to require the state’s elections board to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls who they asserted were potentially “ineligible” voters.
Republicans alleged that the North Carolina State Board of Elections unlawfully registered the voters by using a form that did not mandate the collection of a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
Because of that, they said the voters should be removed from the rolls or allowed to cast provisional ballots. The appeals court heard oral arguments Monday.
Another judge on the panel questioned whether the challenge should have reached a federal court at all.
Judge Albert Diaz wrote in a concurring opinion that the RNC and North Carolina Republicans “made by the barest of threads” the showing necessary to prove they met the threshold for standing.
“This lawsuit began in state court before being removed quickly to federal court,” Diaz wrote. “That removal should have prompted a fundamental jurisdictional question: Does the plaintiffs’ complaint plead the necessary … standing ‘to get in the federal courthouse door?'”
“The district court’s opinion didn’t consider this issue,” he added.
