A federal judge who once blocked North Carolina's voter identification law reversed course Thursday and ruled the law constitutional, finding that the voting rights groups who challenged it failed to prove it was discriminatory. The decision, spanning 134 pages, lands ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and settles a legal battle that dragged on for seven years.
Judge Loretta Biggs, appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, had issued a preliminary injunction in December 2019 that stopped the state from enforcing the voter ID requirement during the 2020 election cycle. Now, the same judge has reached the opposite conclusion, upholding the very law she once halted.
The ruling is a clear win for Republicans in North Carolina and for the broader principle that asking voters to show identification before casting a ballot is not, by itself, an act of racial discrimination. It also deals a blow to the progressive legal strategy that has treated voter ID laws as inherently suspect, a strategy built less on evidence than on political framing.
Biggs's 134-page decision tossed out allegations that the law violated the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs, liberal voting rights groups that sued North Carolina's election board, argued the law was racially motivated. Biggs disagreed, at least in legal terms. As Fox News Digital reported, the judge wrote that higher court precedents left her no room to side with the challengers.
In her own words, Biggs stated:
"This Court... concludes that it is compelled by controlling case law to render Judgment in favor of the Defendants."
She went further, explaining the legal framework that forced her hand:
"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."
That language is worth pausing on. Biggs acknowledged North Carolina's "sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression" and described a "history of extensive official discrimination against African Americans." She even said she found evidence the voter ID law served to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters. But she concluded that the precedents set by higher courts meant the evidence was not enough to invalidate the law.
In other words, the judge personally seemed sympathetic to the plaintiffs' case, but the law compelled a different result. That distinction matters. It means the ruling rests not on a judge's political preferences but on the legal standard that appellate courts have established. That is how the system is supposed to work.
North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring photo ID at the polls. The margin was decisive: 55% voted in favor. The GOP-led state Senate then crafted a bill in 2018 to govern how the state would enforce the new requirement.
Almost immediately, the legal challenges began. Voting rights groups sued, and Biggs blocked the law before it could take full effect. Her December 2019 injunction kept the requirement off the books for the entire 2020 election cycle, a cycle in which election integrity was a central national concern.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit later reversed Biggs's injunction. The state Supreme Court also upheld the law in a separate state-level case. Republican state Sen. Phil Berger intervened in the federal case to defend the statute. On Thursday, after seven years, the trial court finally caught up with the appellate courts.
Berger celebrated the outcome on X, posting:
"Finally. After seven years, we can put to rest any doubt that our state's Voter I.D. law is constitutional."
Seven years. A voter ID requirement backed by a majority of the state's citizens, upheld by higher courts at both the state and federal level, was kept in legal limbo for the better part of a decade. The plaintiffs lost at every turn above the trial court, and now they have lost there, too.
The ruling arrives against a backdrop of heated rhetoric from Democratic leaders who have worked to brand any voter ID measure as a tool of racial suppression. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called voter ID laws "Jim Crow 2.0" and described the SAVE America Act, a federal bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, as "a dagger to the heart of our democracy."
Schumer is currently blocking Senate passage of the SAVE America Act, which the House has already passed. The bill would impose a nationwide requirement that people provide a physical document proving U.S. citizenship when they register. President Trump has been aggressively urging Congress to pass it, and during a roundtable in Memphis called on Republicans not to agree to a DHS funding deal unless it includes the measure.
The "Jim Crow" comparison has always been more slogan than substance. Jim Crow laws were designed to exclude Black citizens from public life through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright violence. Asking every voter, regardless of race, to show a photo ID at the polls is not in the same moral universe. Even an Obama-appointed judge, after reviewing 134 pages of evidence and law, could not sustain the claim that North Carolina's version was discriminatory.
Schumer's record of inflammatory legal and constitutional claims from Democratic leaders is not new. The pattern is familiar: label a commonsense policy as racist, litigate it for years, and hope the courts will do what the ballot box would not. In this case, the courts refused.
The ruling leaves North Carolina's voter ID law firmly in place ahead of the 2026 midterms. Voters in the state will be required to present photo identification, just as 55% of them voted to require years ago. The legal cloud that hung over the law through two full election cycles has finally cleared.
The broader significance extends beyond North Carolina. Voter ID laws exist in dozens of states. The argument that such laws are inherently discriminatory has been a pillar of progressive election litigation for more than a decade. When even a judge appointed by Obama, one who acknowledged the state's history of discrimination and expressed sympathy for the plaintiffs' evidence, cannot find a legal basis to strike down a voter ID requirement, the "Jim Crow 2.0" argument loses whatever remaining credibility it had.
That does not mean the legal fights will stop. Voting rights organizations have built entire institutional structures around challenging these laws. But the trajectory is clear. Higher courts have consistently sided with the principle that states may require identification to vote. Biggs's ruling, however reluctant in tone, confirms that even at the trial level the law holds.
Meanwhile, the federal debate over the SAVE America Act continues. Democrats in the Senate, led by Schumer, remain opposed. Their argument, that requiring proof of citizenship to register is somehow an assault on democracy, faces the same headwinds as the North Carolina challenge. Voters overwhelmingly support ID requirements. Courts have upheld them. The only people who seem to find them objectionable are politicians whose legal and constitutional arguments keep collapsing under scrutiny.
President Trump has made election integrity a signature issue, advocating stricter voter ID laws nationwide to prevent illegal immigrants from potentially casting ballots and to address allegations of widespread fraud. The North Carolina ruling gives that effort a concrete legal foundation, not from a Trump-appointed judge, but from one placed on the bench by his predecessor.
Judge Biggs did not want to reach this result. Her own language makes that plain. She catalogued the state's history of discrimination. She noted evidence of disenfranchisement. And then she followed the law anyway, because the precedents from higher courts gave her no other option.
That is the system working. Not perfectly, not quickly, seven years is an absurd timeline for a question this straightforward, but correctly. The voters of North Carolina said they wanted voter ID. Their legislature passed a law. The courts, including an Obama appointee, upheld it.
When a judge who blocked your law in 2019 upholds it in 2026, you don't have a close call. You have a settled question, and the people who spent seven years pretending otherwise owe voters an explanation.
