(Reuters) – As allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election lingered like a bad hangover, Paul Brachman and David Giller had a formidable task.

Working pro bono, the two senior associates at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison led the way in challenging a North Carolina voter ID law that they argued would disproportionately impact Black voters.

The law’s Republican proponents claimed that requiring voters to show photo identification was a “common sense” safeguard against fraud (never mind that documented instances of such fraud are exceedingly rare) and would enhance public confidence in elections.

But Brachman, Giller and co-counsel from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice after a 14-day online bench trial convinced the majority of a three-judge state court panel that the law violates North Carolina’s constitutional prohibitions on intentional discrimination and must permanently be enjoined.

For the high-stakes win, the Paul, Weiss pair are Legal Action’s Pro Bono Heroes for the month of September.

“The law put obstacles disproportionately between African American voters and the ballot,” Brachman told me. “I felt like we had a wealth of evidence to work with, and the narrative almost told itself.”

The North Carolina legislators, who are represented by Cooper & Kirk, are not giving up. “This fight is just getting started,” North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore said in an email. “In fact, we filed our notice of appeal last Friday. We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to advocate on behalf of the voters of North Carolina.”

The Paul, Weiss lawyers are prepared to take the case to the state’s highest court if necessary, hopeful that it may be more receptive to their claim than the U.S. Supreme Court, which in recent years has repeatedly sided against voting rights plaintiffs.

“We definitely wanted to bring the case in North Carolina,” Brachman said. “We hope to show that state courts can be a meaningful alternative to protect voting rights if the environment in the (U.S. Supreme Court) is less than receptive.”

Giller added, “I hope the legacy of this case is that there can be hope. So often (restrictive voting) laws are passed, and people think nothing can be done about it. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways of working within the system.”

The court did not find (nor did the Paul, Weiss team argue) that the Republican lawmakers were motivated by “any racial animus or hatred towards African American voters.” Instead, the majority held that they were spurred by partisan politics, since Black voters in North Carolina tend to favor Democrats.

“The facts and evidence show that race and politics in North Carolina remain closely linked, and that racially polarized voting continues to create an incentive to target African American voters when they reliably vote against the party in power,” Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr wrote in a decision issued Sept. 17.

Judge Nathaniel Poovey dissented, writing that “no registered voter in this state will be precluded from voting by the identification requirements in this law.”

The law at issue, SB 824, was enacted after 55% of North Carolinians in 2018 voted in favor of amending the state constitution to require voters to “present photographic identification before voting.”

A previous North Carolina voter ID law had been struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016 as discriminatory.

The new version was less restrictive. Acceptable forms of ID included student IDs, government employee IDs and tribal IDs. Voters could also get a free ID from the Department of Motor Vehicles or the county boards of elections, and those without acceptable ID could still cast a provisional ballot.

Moreover, Joel Ford, a Black Democrat and then-senator, was one of SB 824’s primary sponsors (though he admitted he was not caucusing with Democrats at the time he co-sponsored the legislation).

To attack the law, the Paul, Weiss team – which also included litigation partners Andrew Ehrlich and Jane O’Brien and associates Benjamin Symons, Amitav Chakraborty, Ryan Rizzuto, Taylor Williams and Samuel Patterson, as well as co-counsel Allison Riggs from Southern Coalition for Social Justice – pointed to North Carolina’s long history of racially discriminatory voting laws, such as a literacy test, poll tax and legislative districts that diluted Black voting power.

They also focused on the atypical sequence of events leading to the law’s passage. State legislators during a lame duck session overrode the veto of North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, on Dec. 19, 2018, right before Republicans lost their supermajority.

The move also came after the state’s racially gerrymandered districts were ordered redrawn, which to the majority of the three-judge panel “suggests that Republicans wanted to entrench themselves by passing their preferred, and more restrictive, version of a voter ID law.”

The majority continued: “Overall, the rushed process did not allow enough time for the legislature to consider data on who might be disenfranchised by the law, to receive public input, or to debate all of the proposed amendments on the House floor.”

Black voters would bear the brunt of the ID restrictions. They “disproportionately lack forms of qualifying identification under S.B. 824, and there is reason to believe that the Republican supermajority understood this when it enacted the law,” the majority found.

As a result, the court ruled that the law was “motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent to target African American voters” and could not stand.

Brachman and Giller told me they are deeply gratified by the result, especially for their clients such as Jabari Holmes, who has a disability and would find the additional ID requirement to be an obstacle to voting.

“I’m delighted for our plaintiffs, who were so brave in attaching their names to the case,” Brachman said.

Giller added, “They just want the opportunity to vote.”

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