Several residents of Kinston, N.C., filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging an Obama administration decision that the town must keep political parties in local elections because equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

By Ben Conery at Washington Times

A feud involving local elections in a small North Carolina city is now a battleground over the future of one of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act’s most critical and contentious elements.

Several residents of Kinston, N.C., filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging an Obama administration decision that the town must keep political parties in local elections because equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

Kinston voters decided overwhelmingly in a 2008 referendum to eliminate partisan elections, but the Justice Department stopped the change because the city is among 12,000 almost exclusively Southern voting districts that require department approval before making any changes to voting procedures.

The lawsuit argues that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which gives the federal government this power, is unconstitutional. It was filed on behalf of local residents by the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative group that learned about the situation from a report in The Washington Times.

“Although the Voting Rights Act has accomplished many valuable goals, its ‘temporary’ Section 5 provision is now unconstitutional because it singles out certain jurisdictions for extraordinary burdens based on 46-year-old election results,” Michael Carvin, a Washington lawyer who is handling the case pro bono, said in a statement.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The department’s decision in Kinston, which affects races for city council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

“Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office,” Loretta King, who at the time was the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the city.

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