A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, July 20, 2016, that Texas’ strict voter ID law discriminates against minorities and the poor and must quickly be scrubbed of those effects before the November 2016 election.
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Judge Adelman used a 44-page ruling to say there are thousands of qualified Wisconsin voters who lack a license to vote identification, and remarked it would “be impossible or almost impossible” for most to obtain the “official” voter ID card required under the ALEC-written Wisconsin law.
Texas’ voter identification law violates the US law prohibiting racial discrimination in elections, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
The 2011 law forces voters to show a photo ID to be able to exercise their right to vote although the United States has no national identity document. Supreme Court gutted an essential piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required states with a history of voter discrimination to get federal approval changes to voting laws.
“It is imperative that the State government safeguards our elections and ensures the integrity of our democratic process”.
“Although most voters in Wisconsin either possess qualifying ID or can easily obtain one, a safety net is needed for those voters who cannot obtain qualifying ID with reasonable effort”. 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. The Court, in making its ruling, ordered the Federal District Court in Corpus Christi to find the appropriate remedy as soon as possible.
He said one possibility could be to allow those who are unable to obtain an ID to sign an affidavit as to their identification.
That ambiguity is what led the judges to send the decision back to a lower court, to decide whether or not to actually halt the law.
The lower court will be allowed to leave the law in place for the current election so as to avoid voter confusion “despite unresolved issues related to disenfranchisement”. The state asked that the full 5th Circuit hear the case in May and the court granted that request. In Wednesday’s ruling, the judges rejected that argument.
Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, called the ruling “an enormous victory for voters in Texas”.
The new ruling “sets up a potential Supreme Court showdown over the contentious issue of state photo ID rules”, USA Today reports.
Attorneys for the law’s challengers said the Voting Rights Act requires courts to look closely at the context and consequences of the changes and whether they are needlessly burdensome.
The 203-page ruling is full of strongly worded comments from various judges on the appeals court. The appeals court noted that in the past, Texas lawmakers had defended racially discriminatory voting policies, such as all-white primaries and poll taxes, as a way to prevent voter fraud.
In its ruling, the 5th Circuit suggested that Texas might have drafted its voter ID law with intent to discriminate.
“By keeping this latter claim alive, the majority fans the flames of perniciously irresponsible racial name-calling”, wrote Judge Edith J. Jones. The lower court must now craft a remedy to fix the law’s legal infirmities.
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“The record shows that drafters and proponents of SB 14 were aware of the likely disproportionate effect of the law on minorities, and that they nonetheless passed the bill without adopting a number of proposed ameliorative measures that might have lessened this impact”, Judge Catharina Haynes wrote for the majority.
