North Carolina gov moves to end suit over restrictive voting reforms

North Carolina’s new Democratic governor on Tuesday moved to end a years-long legal battle over a package of election reforms that voting rights advocates charge would disenfranchise thousands of low-income and minority voters.

Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, also a Democrat, on Tuesday withdrew the state’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court appealing a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from last year that overturned the reforms.

{mosads}The 4th Circuit had ruled against the 2013 reform package, passed by the Republican-led Legislature, which the court said was intended to discriminate against some voters.

“We need to make it easier for people to exercise their right to vote, not harder, and I will not continue to waste time and money appealing this unconstitutional law,” Cooper said in a statement announcing the move.

In a statement posted on his Facebook page, Stein said attorneys representing civil rights groups that sued to block the law had agreed to give up $12 million in legal fees incurred in the three years since the suit was filed.

Cooper’s move does not end the case altogether: The state Board of Elections is still a defendant and the state legislature — which remains in GOP hands — could take up the case.

Republican legislative leaders said the Supreme Court should reject the attempt to end the case. In a joint statement, state House Speaker Tim Moore (R) and Senate President Phil Berger (R) said state law gives the Legislature the authority to hire outside lawyers to defend the package of reforms.

“Roy Cooper’s and Josh Stein’s desperate and politically motivated stunt to derail North Carolina’s voter ID law is not only illegal, it also raises serious questions about whether they’ve allowed their own personal and political prejudices and conflicts of interest to cloud their professional judgment,” Moore and Berger said.

Republicans and Democrats fought constantly over the 2013 measure, which would have implemented strict voter identification requirements, limited the number of early voting locations and set new conditions for casting provisional ballots, among other provisions.