Ruling Preserves Voting Rights for Thousands in North Carolina

A federal judge barred three North Carolina counties on Friday from revoking the voting rights of thousands of residents whose eligibility to cast ballots had been challenged by Republican political operatives only weeks before the presidential election.

The ruling settled for now a politically freighted battle, in a hotly contested battleground state, over a move that supporters called an effort to keep elections honest and critics said was a bald attempt at voter suppression.

Judge C. Loretta Biggs of United States District Court in Winston-Salem said that election officials in the three counties had ignored a 23-year-old federal law that lays out specific rules about when and how voters’ registrations can be canceled.

Her remedy, a preliminary injunction, prevents the counties from purging the targeted voters unless a later trial produces a ruling in their favor.

That decision was one of three federal rulings on Friday aimed at protecting the right to vote.

In Arizona, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked a state law that barred third parties from collecting completed absentee ballots from voters — so-called ballot harvesting, a widely used get-out-the-vote tactic. And in Ohio, a United States district judge granted Democrats’ request to bar Donald J. Trump’s campaign and its allies from intimidating voters, but extended the ban to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well.

In the Ohio lawsuit, one of five that Democrats have filed in major states, Judge James S. Gwin issued a broad order that barred political workers from a range of activities within 100 feet of a polling place and 10 feet of a line of voters. They include questioning, harassing, loitering, following, and photographing or recording prospective voters or those who are leaving polling places after voting.

The judge also extended the order to a Trump political ally, Roger Stone, who had formed a group called “Stop the Steal” that announced aggressive poll-monitoring plans, including stopping voters to conduct “exit polls” after they had cast ballots. That was also barred within the areas defined in the order.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/us/north-carolina-voting-rights.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well