The lawsuit, to be announced Monday morning, comes on the heels of a similar challenge filed last month against Texas. It's the latest step in the administration's push to defend voting rights after June's Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act. 
The U.S. Justice Department will file suit against North Carolina’s restrictive voting law, according to reports from severalnewsoutlets. The expected lawsuit, which comes on the heels of a similar challenge filed last month against Texas, is the latest step in the Obama administration’s effort to defend voting rights in the wake of June’s Supreme Court ruling that weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Attorney General Eric Holder was expected to announce the lawsuit Monday at a noon ET press conference.
North Carolina’s voting law, passed in July, is perhaps the nation’s strictest. In addition to requiring voters to show a limited range of state-issued IDs, it also cuts back on early voting and ends same-day voter registration, among other provisions. All of those provisions disproportionately affect racial minorities, studies show. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UC Irvine and a prominent expert on voting, has called the law “a laundry list of ways to make it harder for people to vote.”
The measure was pushed by Republican lawmakers who control the state’s legislature, and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican.
The lawsuit’s chances are uncertain at best. It will likely cite Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which experts say is a weaker tool for stopping race bias in voting than Section 5, which the Supreme Court invalidated in June. Under Section 5, the federal government could block changes proposed by covered jurisdictions if the changes might reduce the political standing of minorities, as compared to the previous status quo. Under Section 2, plaintiffs need to show that an election change denies minorities an equal opportunity to participate in the political process—a far vaguer standard*. And unlike Section 5, which required covered jurisdictions to submit proposed changes in advance, Section 2 is an after-the-fact remedy.
About half of North Carolina’s counties were covered under Section 5. Since the Court’s ruling, several other southern states previously covered by Section 5, including Alabama, Florida, and Virginia, have announced plans to push ahead with restrictive voting measures.
An August poll found that just 39% of North Carolinians support their state’s law, with 50% opposed.
*This paragraph has been corrected from an earlier version.
