A federal judge appointed by President Obama has ruled that North Carolina's voter identification law is constitutional, reversing her own earlier position that the measure was racially discriminatory. The 134-page decision ends a seven-year legal fight and leaves the law firmly in place ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Judge Loretta Biggs dismissed claims by liberal voting rights groups that the law violated the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act. The same judge had blocked enforcement of the law in December 2019, calling it part of a "sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression" and declaring it "impermissibly motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent."
On Thursday, she reached the opposite conclusion. Not because she changed her mind about North Carolina's history, but because higher courts told her the history didn't matter the way she thought it did.
Biggs wrote in her decision, as reported by Fox News Digital:
"This Court... concludes that it is compelled by controlling case law to render Judgment in favor of the Defendants."
She went further, acknowledging that appellate precedent forced her hand on two specific points. Biggs stated that "case law requires this Court to assign less weight to the historical background. It further requires almost impenetrable deference to the presumption of legislative good faith."
In other words: even though Biggs found that North Carolina had a "history of extensive official discrimination against African Americans", a fact she said was undisputed by either side, the legal standard set by higher courts meant that history alone could not sink the law. She also acknowledged finding evidence that the voter ID requirement served to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters, but said the precedents set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit meant the evidence was insufficient to invalidate the statute.
The plaintiffs lost on every count.
The road to Thursday's ruling stretches back to 2018, when about 55% of North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring photo identification at the polls. The GOP-led state Senate then crafted a bill to govern how the state would enforce that amendment.
Liberal voting rights groups promptly sued North Carolina's election board, arguing the law was designed to suppress minority votes. Biggs sided with them in December 2019, issuing a preliminary injunction that blocked the state from enforcing the law for the entire 2020 election cycle. North Carolina voters cast ballots that year without the ID requirement their own constitutional amendment had demanded.
But the 4th Circuit reversed Biggs' injunction. And in a separate state-level case, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law. Those rulings boxed Biggs in. By the time the federal case returned to her courtroom for a final decision, the appellate landscape had shifted beneath her feet.
Republican state Sen. Phil Berger, who had intervened in the case to defend the law, celebrated the outcome on X:
"Finally. After seven years, we can put to rest any doubt that our state's Voter I.D. law is constitutional."
The North Carolina ruling lands in the middle of a national debate over election security. President Trump has been advocating stricter voter ID laws nationwide and aggressively urging Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose a nationwide requirement that people provide a physical document proving U.S. citizenship when they register to vote. The House passed the bill, but it has stalled in the Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has called voter ID laws "Jim Crow 2.0" and labeled the SAVE America Act "a dagger to the heart of our democracy." He is currently blocking the bill from Senate passage.
During a roundtable in Memphis, Trump called on Republicans not to agree to a Department of Homeland Security funding deal unless it includes the SAVE America Act. The president has tied border security funding directly to the voter ID question, treating the two as parts of the same problem.
The contrast between Biggs' 2019 injunction and her 2026 ruling is worth sitting with. The same judge. The same law. The same state history. And yet the outcome flipped entirely, not because the facts changed, but because higher courts told her she was weighing them wrong.
In 2019, Biggs treated North Carolina's history of racial discrimination as a trump card that could override the legislature's stated purpose. The 4th Circuit and the state Supreme Court said otherwise. They required deference to lawmakers' good faith. They required less weight on historical background. And when Biggs applied that standard, the voter ID law survived every challenge thrown at it.
This matters beyond North Carolina. For years, opponents of voter ID have relied on a formula: invoke Jim Crow, cite disparate impact, and ask a sympathetic judge to block the law. Schumer's "Jim Crow 2.0" rhetoric is the political version of that same playbook. The argument assumes that any requirement to show identification at the polls is inherently discriminatory, even when 55% of a state's voters, in a racially diverse electorate, approved the requirement themselves.
Biggs' own ruling dismantles that assumption. She found the evidence of disenfranchisement, weighed it against the legal standard, and concluded it wasn't enough. If an Obama-appointed judge who once called the law discriminatory can't sustain that argument under binding precedent, the argument has a problem.
The ruling leaves North Carolina's voter ID law in full effect heading into the 2026 midterms. Whether the voting rights groups that brought the case will appeal is not yet clear, but the 4th Circuit has already shown its hand by reversing Biggs' earlier injunction.
At the federal level, the SAVE America Act remains stuck in the Senate. Democrats have the votes to block it for now. But every state-level win for voter ID, especially one delivered by a judge appointed by a Democratic president, makes the opposition's position harder to defend.
North Carolina voters asked for voter ID in 2018. Seven years, multiple lawsuits, and 134 pages of judicial reasoning later, they finally have it. The law survived not because the courts ignored history, but because they refused to let history override the will of the voters who approved the measure in the first place.
When even the judge who tried to stop a law ends up upholding it, maybe the law was never the problem.
