RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal judge has halted the enforcement of a North Carolina law that made it a serious crime for someone to vote while still on probation or parole for a felony conviction when they had simply violated the voting law by mistake.

The ruling was celebrated by groups representing poor residents and Black union members – and is limited, addressing some allegations of illegal voting conducted before 2024.

That’s because the General Assembly amended the law last fall so that starting Jan. 1 a felony offender has to know they were breaking the law by voting for there for it to be considered a crime. But the old law had not been repealed.

The plaintiffs in a 2020 lawsuit said that people would still be subject to prosecution for votes allegedly cast before 2024 under the old rules, which didn’t require intentionality to violate them. They said local district attorneys could otherwise still prosecute scores of pending cases.

In her ruling filed late Monday, U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs said that the pre-2024 law was unconstitutionally vague. She cited evidence in the case of DAs questioning whether intent was necessary as proof that the law lacked standards to prevent its arbitrary enforcement.

And Biggs wrote the pre-2024 law was tainted by racial bias, with its origins going back to the Jim Crow era.

“The Challenged Statute was enacted with discriminatory intent, has not been cleansed of its discriminatory taint, and continues to disproportionately impact Black voters,” Biggs said in granting the motion sought by lawyers for Action NC and the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

There is uncontested evidence of the law originating in an 1877 law that placed harsh penalties on disenfranchised felons, particularly Black residents, Biggs wrote. In recent years, an outsized percentage of Black voters were investigated compared to the percentage of the state’s Black population under the pre-2024 law, she continued.

Government lawyers for the State Board of Elections and for district attorneys who were sued had argued that passage of a new North Carolina Constitution in the early 1970s created “a break from the history” of the law’s otherwise discriminatory past. But Biggs disagreed and pointed out the challenged law was virtually unchanged for decades, from 1931 to 2023.

Biggs’ summary judgment order could be appealed. The state Department of Justice, whose attorneys helped defend the elections board and the DAs, was reviewing the decision Tuesday, a spokesperson said.

The state constitution says a person convicted of a felony can’t vote until their rights of citizenship are restored “in the manner prescribed by law.”

North Carolina law and a recent court ruling state that a convicted felon can’t vote again until they complete their punishments, which include incarceration, probation and other close supervision. Their rights are then automatically restored, but a person must reregister to vote.

The plaintiffs, which are also voter education groups, said that allowing the pre-2024 law to remain in place also would have forced them to use resources to educate ex-felons who were eligible to vote but remained fearful about registering again, in case DAs keep prosecuting people from previous elections.

Biggs’ decision “will help ensure that voters who mistakenly think they are eligible to cast a ballot will not be criminalized for simply trying to re-engage in the political process and perform their civic duty,” Mitchell Brown, an attorney from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who helped represent the plaintiffs, said in a news release.

Biggs issued the ruling, even as a U.S. magistrate judge had recommended in January that the lawsuit be dismissed, citing the Jan. 1 alteration as substantially diminishing the threat of prosecution faced by prospective voters.

The lawsuit was initially filed in September 2020 but legal hurdles delayed the matter.

On Wednesday, nearly 200 supporters of the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign traveled to Raleigh to remind lawmakers returning for the legislative short session that low-income voters make up more than 41% of the state’s electorate.

If low-income eligible voters voted at the same rate as higher-income voters, campaign leaders warned, they could control the outcome of elections.

“That is a sleeping giant that is ready to be activated,” said Rev. Rob Stephens, Repairers of the Breach North Carolina Organizing Committee coordinator and member of the NC Poor People’s Campaign. “If we could just turn out 19% of that group who haven’t voted before, we could fundamentally shift the entire landscape of elections in North Carolina.

Rev. Wayne Wilhelm, one of the chairs of the NC Poor People’s Campaign, said lawmakers need to know that North Carolinians are watching them.

“Your vote is your voice, but showing up before the vote lets them know we’re serious about the changes we need to see,” Wilhelm said. “Poverty is a policy choice. To allow poverty to continue when there is really more than enough for everyone is a moral failure and we will stand up and call it out.”

Before marching to the Legislative Building, speakers rallied outside of the State Capitol to criticize the Republican-led General Assembly for what they called excessive tax cuts, spending millions of tax dollars on private school vouchers, and not increasing the minimum wage in more than a decade.

Instead of addressing the crises of poverty and low wages, lack of healthcare, underfunded public education, voter suppression and environmental collapse, the General Assembly slashed taxes for the wealthy and corporations, promoted a culture of fear and hate, failed to fully fund public education, and cut protections for the most vulnerable North Carolinians, the speakers said.

They also took lawmakers to task for not supporting legislation to improve pay for child care workers. The state will soon spend the last of $1.3 billion in federal grant money that helped child care providers make it through the pandemic. Some of the money was used to increase worker pay.

NC Newsline’s Lynn Bonner reported recently that a February North Carolina Child Care Resource and Referral Council survey found that 88% of childcare providers will need to increase parent fees when the federal money runs out. Forty percent said they would have to raise parent fees immediately. About half said they would lose administrative and teaching staff and about two-thirds said they would have trouble hiring new employees with comparable experience and education.

Nearly one-third of the programs surveyed said they would have to close within a year. That’s equivalent to more than 1,500 programs and close to 92,000 childcare and early education slots.

During the 2023 legislative long session, lawmakers took no action on legislation asking for $300 million this fiscal year to extend the compensation grant portion of the federal Childcare Stabilization Grant. Supporters said the money would reduce teacher turnover, improve the quality of child care and keep rates affordable for parents.

Without state funding, Emma Biggs, a Charlotte child care advocate and provider, said the coming year will be a tough one for families.

Biggs said all of the state’s 100 counties are considered “child care deserts,” meaning there are not enough child care centers or teachers to accommodate children and families.

“We don’t have a shortage of children,” Biggs said. “We have a shortage of teachers due to a broken system where parents cannot afford to pay more, and teachers cannot afford to make less.”

On Wednesday, Gov. Roy Cooper’s recommended budget for fiscal year 2024-25 called for a $745 million investment in child care and early education. The investment would help to avoid the “fiscal cliff in child care funding” and keep child care centers open with $200 million for Child Care Stabilization Grants. It would also provide $128.5 million for child care subsidies to increase reimbursement rates for providers in rural and low-wealth communities.

Private school vouchers were also a top target for speakers at Wednesday’s event. Last year, lawmakers expanded the state’s controversial voucher program to make it accessible to the state’s wealthiest families. The program was created a decade ago to help low-income families in struggling schools pay private school tuition.

Yevonne Brannon, a Public Schools First NC board member, noted that House Speaker Tim Moore said he will ask for $300 million more in the short session to fund private school vouchers.

“They had already planned to spend $5 billion on school vouchers over the next few years, so that’s not enough,” Brannon said. “Now they’re going to make sure that the wealthy families — that $300 million is not for low-income or struggling children — it is for wealth families that are already in private school and can afford private school.”   

Sangria Noble, an organizer for the NC Poor People’s Campaign, said poverty is a policy choice. For example, she noted, that the state hasn’t increased the minimum wage since 2008.

“We cannot survive here off of $7.25,” Noble said. “We will end up homeless. We will end up dead.”

Noble was one of the activists assisting unhoused people forced to move from an encampment off of U.S. 70 near Garner on Tuesday. The inhabitants were ordered to move or face arrest after police deemed the encampment unsafe, citing an uptick in crime.

Noble spoke with one man and his pregnant girlfriend who lived in the encampment. He told her that he could probably save enough money in three months working a $10 an hour job to find a place for him and his girlfriend to live, but only after he pays a fine for loitering for sleeping outside.

She said homelessness, poverty and low wages all go hand-in-hand.

“We don’t really have a solution for that man right now,” Noble said. “It looked like the solution yesterday would have been jail. If helped had not come down for protection, it would have been jail.”

In a statement, Bishop William J. Barber II, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign said the United States loses 800 people a day to poverty-related causes.

“Poverty by America is an abolishable and unnecessary reality that can be eradicated by enacting policies that address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of healthcare, militarism, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism,” Barber said. “When our politics makes it easier to get a gun than to get food, quality education, living wages, or healthcare, then there’s a problem with the soul of our nation.”