In what even the McClatchy newspaper called a “”muddled” and “fuzzy” ruling, the four Democrats on the North Carolina Supreme Court said voters never should have been able to approve constitutional amendments adopting Voter ID and reducing the state income tax from 10% to 7%.
The partisan-line vote sent the lawsuit back to a lower court with an instruction to apply a newly-crafted three-prong test. One of those tests requires judges guess how hypothetical lawmakers might vote on a particular proposed law. The second test is whether the constitutional amendment would “perpetuate the exclusion of a category of voters from the democratic process.” The third test requires judges to divine whether the proposed amendment would “constitute intentional discrimination against the same category of voters discriminated against” in the redistricting process.
The Democrat judges said this standard would only apply to constitutional amendments, not ordinary laws that the same legislators passed during the same legislative session.
