North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, urged a federal court to keep in place an injunction on a state law that would require state residents to present a photo ID before voting.
S.B. 824 was blocked by North Carolina and federal judges in the past. With only two months before the presidential election, Cooper asked the court not to allow it to go into effect.
"Lifting the injunction now would be disastrous," Cooper's attorneys told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, according to The Washington Post. "The brunt would be borne by the same voters whom S.B. 824 targeted for disenfranchisement in the first place: minority voters who are both least likely to possess photo IDs that satisfy S.B. 824 and most vulnerable to COVID-19."
The legislation was passed in the North Carolina statehouse once the same court blocked a string of restrictive voter laws in 2016. The court said at the time that the provisions were intended to disenfranchise Black voters "with almost surgical precision."
Lawyers for the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP reportedly said the "unprecedented recent history of racially discriminatory election laws" in the state can't be ignored.
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