More than five years after the North Carolina NAACP and a few local chapters sued the state over a 2018 voter ID law, a trial for the lawsuit challenging the law begins on Monday. 

The lawsuit, as well as similar lawsuits in state courts, had delayed implementation of the law that required voters to show a picture ID until last year’s municipal elections. Photo IDs were required for 1.8 million voters who cast ballots during the state’s primary in March. State election data showed ID-related problems only disqualified fewer than 500 provisional ballots during the primary contest.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs is ruling on the case and is expected to hear arguments from NAACP lawyers that the voter ID requirement and two other voting-related provisions in the 2018 law unlawfully discriminate against Hispanic and black voters.

Voter ID laws are popular with voters, including the black and Latino voters opponents argue are harmed by their implementation. A February poll by the Pew Research Center found that 81% of voters favor requiring everyone to show a government-issued ID when they try to cast a ballot, compared to 18% who oppose such measures.

In a pretrial brief, the attorneys cited data showing black and Latino voters are more than twice as likely to lack a qualifying photo ID than white voters. They plan to argue that the 2018 law violates the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act and to call witnesses who said they encountered problems voting during the March primary. 

However, attorneys representing Republican legislative leaders and North Carolina State Board of Elections members said in briefs that the rules impose only a minimal burden on voters. They pointed out that free IDS are provided by county election and Division of Motor Vehicles officers and also that people without IDs at the polls can still have their votes counted if they fill out an exception form or bring in their ID to election officials before the final tallies. The attorneys also noted that preventing fraud is a legitimate state interest for the law. 

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“The General Assembly enacted [the law] after the People of North Carolina mandated the legislature to create a voter ID law,” lawyers for House Speaker Tim Moore and state Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, both Republicans, wrote in a brief. “The bipartisan legislation did not have a discriminatory intent, and Plaintiffs cannot overcome the presumption of legislative good faith.”

Already, Biggs, who was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama, had issued in 2019 a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law on the grounds that the 2013 law had been struck down on similar grounds of racial bias. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed her decision. She had also denied allowing Berger and Moore from joining the lawsuit as defendants, which they appealed, and the U.S. Supreme Court sided with them in 2022.