Two of the key provisions in North Carolina’s new voting law have been overturned by a a 2-1 ruling of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Yahoo News posted an article yesterday explaining the details.

The two parts of the law that were overturned were same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. The court claimed that to end these practices would disenfranchise some voters. I beg to differ. The reason the legislature ended same-day registration was that it did not provide ample time to check the address information given by the voter. A friend of mine, a North Carolina resident, checked the voter registration in her town and found that there were five people registered at her address that did not live there. I don’t know whether those five people had voted in recent elections or not, but if they did, they cancelled the vote of legal voters–disenfranchising legal voters. Stopping out-of-precinct voting is a good idea because ballots are different in different precincts–precinct elections include local candidates that vary by precinct. If a person votes in the wrong precinct, he may not get to vote for the officials in his precinct–thus he is disenfranchising himself!

The article reports:

State House Speaker Thom Tillis, the Republican challenging incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, said he and state Senate leader Phil Berger, also a Republican, would appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The article at Yahoo attempts to portray the passage of this law as a political issue related to the Republicans wanting to take the Senate. The question we need to ask is, “Why does ensuring the integrity of our elections give a political advantage to Republicans?”

The new North Carolina voting law is a step toward more honest elections. Why are there politicians who are fighting this?