NC Republicans vow to fight US Justice Department over voter laws

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - North Carolina's Republican governor is vowing to fight a lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department challenging the state's tough new elections law on the grounds it disproportionately excludes minority voters.

Gov. Pat McCrory said Monday he has hired a private lawyer to help defend the new law from what he suggested was a partisan attack by President Barack Obama's Democratic administration.

"I believe the federal government action is an overreach and without merit," McCrory said at a brief media conference during which he took no questions. "I firmly believe we have done the right thing. I believe this is good law."

North Carolina's new law cuts early voting by a week, ends same-day voter registration and includes a stringent photo ID requirement. The measure also eliminated a popular high school civics program that encouraged students to register to vote in advance of their 18th birthdays.

More than 70 percent of African-Americans who cast a ballot in North Carolina during the past two presidential elections voted early. Studies show minority voters are also more likely to lack a driver's license.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington on Monday his agency would show in court that the intent of the North Carolina law is to suppress voter turnout, especially among minority and low-income voters.

"By restricting access and ease of voter participation, this new law would shrink, rather than expand, access" to voting, Holder said. "Allowing limits on voting rights that disproportionately exclude minority voters would be inconsistent with our ideals as a nation."

The lawsuit, filed at U.S. District Court in Greensboro, is the latest effort by the Obama administration to counter a Supreme Court decision that struck down the most powerful part of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 5-4 decision handed down earlier this year freed states, many of them in the South, from strict federal oversight of their elections.

Within days of the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina's legislature "took aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African Americans," Holder told reporters, calling it "an intentional attempt to break a system that was working."

State Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and House Speaker Thom Tillis issued a statement that rejected Holder's argument. "The Obama Justice Department's baseless claims about North Carolina's election reform law are nothing more than an obvious attempt to quash the will of the voters and hinder a hugely popular voter ID requirement," they said.

"The law was designed to improve consistency, clarity and uniformity at the polls and it brings North Carolina's election system in line with a majority of other states," the two lawmakers said. "We are confident it protects the right of all voters, as required by the U.S. and North Carolina Constitutions."

North Carolina is among at least five Southern states adopting stricter voter ID and other election laws. The Justice Department on Aug. 22 sued Texas over the state's voter ID law and is seeking to intervene in a lawsuit over redistricting laws in Texas that minority groups consider discriminatory.