Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is getting involved in another fight to combat election fraud, this time leading a coalition of eight other attorneys general in an amicus curiae brief at the Supreme Court regarding North Carolina’s voter ID law. They argued in Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP that North Carolina’s General Assembly should be able to defend the law in court instead of Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, since he opposed the law.
“It is incumbent on public servants to stand up and defend laws when others cower to political pressure,” Brnovich said in a statement. “I am proud that our recent win at the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ability of states to administer elections and pass laws to protect the results.”
Brnovich was referring to his victory for Arizona’s election laws at the Supreme Court last year in Brnovich v. DNC. The DNC sued Arizona over its election laws banning ballot harvesting and prohibiting voting in the wrong precinct, and since Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs refused to defend the laws, Brnovich stepped in instead. He argued the case himself and the justices sided with him 6-3 on July 1.
Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP arose out of a lawsuit filed over a bill the General Assembly in North Carolina passed last year requiring voter ID at the polls. Cooper vetoed the bill but the General Assembly overrode it. This took place just a few weeks after the voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring voter ID at the polls.
After a trial court agreed with the NAACP plaintiffs and struck down the law, the General Assembly attempted to defend the law on appeal, but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to allow the legislators to represent the state in the litigation. Instead, the court ruled that Cooper’s appointed members of the North Carolina Board of Elections were sufficient to defend the law — despite the fact Cooper had vetoed the law.
Brnovich and the amici argued in their brief, “When a state law is challenged in federal court, authorized state agents may intervene in addition to named state defendants if the existing parties ‘may be inadequate’ to fully defend the State’s interest in the validity of its laws and such intervention is timely sought.”
They argued that the principles of federalism give states the power to decide who will represent their interests, and case law provides that they may choose more than one agent for that. The attorneys general warned, “The strategic surrender of as little as one party/agency — often unelected — replaces the will of the people, as expressed by their elected representatives.”
North Carolina’s voter ID law is very accommodating, in order to get around accusations of disenfranchisement and racism. It ensures that free photo ID is available at county election offices in all of the state’s 100 counties. It also allows voters who show up at the polls without ID to complete a reasonable impediment form to indicate why they could not present ID and vote with a provisional ballot.
In recent years, Democrats have deliberately sued Democratic election officials and other Democratic officials presiding over election integrity laws, knowing the officials would not put up a defense so the laws would be easily struck down.
Joining Brnovich were the attorneys general of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah.
Brnovich is currently investigating the report from the Maricopa County independent ballot audit which found that fraud may have been committed in the 2020 presidential election. Prior to the presidential election, he stopped Democratic Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes from mailing ballots to voters who had not requested them. Last month, he stopped Hobbs from making changes to the state voter election procedures manual that would allow voters to cast ballots in precincts they don’t live in.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
