Supreme Court Refuses to Hear NC's Voter ID Appeal. It's Not a Big Deal.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up an appeal filed by the North Carolina Legislature in response to the three-judge panel striking down its state voter ID law and other election reforms.

No one should read anything substantive into this.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Monday in a two-page supplement to the court’s refusal to accept the case for review, “[g]iven the blizzard of filings over who is and who is not authorized to seek review in this Court under North Carolina law, it is important to recall our frequent admonition that ‘[t]he denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case.’”

In other words, the Supreme Court was not ruling here on whether the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' three-judge panel was correct in its assessment of the North Carolina law. (It wasn’t.)

In fact, the chief justice spends two pages talking about the procedural chaos in the case that seems to be the obvious reason for the court’s refusal.

It was private lawyers hired by the North Carolina Legislature that filed the petition for certiorari on behalf of the state asking for the Supreme Court’s review.

But the handling of the case changed dramatically after the November 2016 election, when a new, Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, was elected.

More