However, the very next year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a critical component of the landmark civil rights law that had required states with a pronounced history of racial discrimination (like Texas) to get federal approval before tweaking state voting or elections laws.
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Texas’ strict voter-ID law discriminates against members of minority groups and the poor and must quickly be scrubbed of those effects before the November election, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
Those wide-ranging restrictions came under attack as racially discriminatory before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit inn June.
Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement saying the court “wrongly concluded the law had a discriminatory effect” and that voter fraud is real and “undermines the integrity of the election process”.
President Barack Obama’s administration took the unusual step of deploying the weight of the U.S. Justice Department into the case when it challenged the law, which requires Texas residents to show one of seven forms of approved identification. It also ordered a district court to consider whether lawmakers did so intentionally, which could force the state to once again submit to oversight of its voting laws.
That panel’s ruling last August overturned a lower court’s judgment that Texas voter ID law was created with a racially discriminatory objective.
An emergency appeal to the Supreme Court for the losing party will likely prove a risky play due the probability of a 4-4 deadlock, reverting to the previous ruling.
“In the upcoming session, I am confident we will be able to craft legislation in compliance with the court’s findings to ensure we meet constitutional requirements while protecting election integrity at the ballot box”, Perry said. “Democrats have argued for more than a decade that Republican attempts to pass a voter ID bill are discriminatory”. But the court now is split 4 to 4 on ideological grounds, and it would require the vote of five to overturn the circuit court decision. Dr. Stephen Ansolabehere, an expert in voting behavior, presented a regression analysis, which found “Hispanic registered voters and Black registered voters were respectively 195% and 305% more likely than their Anglo peers to lack” the necessary ID.
“No American should ever lose their right to vote just because they don’t have a photo ID”.
The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS), founded in 2001 and one of the nation’s leading progressive legal organizations, is a rapidly growing network of lawyers, law students, scholars, judges, policymakers and other concerned individuals dedicated to making the law a force to improve lives of all people.
Violations of the Voting Rights Act could also spread to other states such as North Carolina, who have enacted similar voter ID laws also claiming rampant voter fraud. For example, military IDs and concealed handgun carry permits – they’re lawful to vote.
The majority opinion did not find that the law was passed with discriminatory intent. As the Texas Tribune explains: “Texas is among nine states categorized as requiring ‘strict photo ID, ‘ and its list of acceptable forms is the shortest”.
Law professor at the University of California-Irvine, Richard L. Hansen, calls the 5th Circuit Court’s ruling a sign that “you can go too far with a voter ID law”. Through April, Paxton’s office had spent more than $3.5 million defending the law in several lawsuits, its records show.
The court also scrutinized the way the law was defended and passed.
The case, Veasey v. Abbott, will return to U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos’ federal court in Corpus Christi.
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“It is unfortunate that this common-sense law, providing protections against fraud, was not upheld in its entirety”, Paxton said in a statement.
