A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Texas’s controversial voter ID law is discriminatory and violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
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“The 5th Circuit rightly reversed the lower court’s finding of discriminatory objective, but wrongly concluded the law had a discriminatory effect”.
The ruling was issued Wednesday by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. While the 1965 law required that lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters get federal permission before changing voting rules, in a 5-4 decision the court’s conservative block decreed that voting discrimination was no longer a threat in America, Atlanta Black Star reports. As many criticized the High Court for effectively gutting the Voting Rights Act, then-Gov.
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. The law was eventually allowed to remain in effect because that ruling came so close to that November’s election.
Because the law wasn’t entirely thrown out as expected, voters who lack the necessary forms of ID will be allowed to sign an affidavit and vote for now. In this case, the appeals court told the trial court to keep the voter identification law in place but create an alternative means to vote for those who face a reasonable impediment in producing the right form of identification. The trial judge is to decide that question without gathering new factual evidence.
“We affirm the district court’s finding that S.B”. Previous year the law was ruled as unconstitutional before it was appealed again. In her opinion Wednesday, Haynes even acknowledged that in every redistricting cycle since 1970, Texas has been found to have violated the Voting Rights Act with racially gerrymandered districts. “As Attorney General I prosecuted cases against voter fraud across the State, and Texas will continue to make sure there is no illegal voting at the ballot box”. The lawsuit challenging the law was born in North Texas. That ruling, however, did not affect the potential pre-clearance requirement available under Section 2, which applies nationwide.
Black and Latino registered voters normally are unable to provide one of the seven photo IDs required, which includes driver licenses, military IDs, passports or concealed carry licenses.
Other states with similar voter ID laws have survived legal challenges because they offered better alternatives to those seeking ID, than Texas’ election identification certificate, the court said, which the state hasn’t properly funded or promoted.
Q: What happened prior to the latest ruling?
If the judge does once again find discriminatory intent and moves ahead to fashion remedies for that, those remedies can not be put into effect until after the November election, according to the decision. Wednesday’s ruling did not immediately halt the voter ID law, which has been in effect since 2013. The law has a specific list of the kind of official IDs that must be presented, makes it hard or – for the poor – costly to obtain any of them, and it makes only the narrowest exceptions, even in hardship cases. “The Court further holds that SB 14 constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax”.
The Supreme Court, which refused to block the law in April, left open the possibility it would step in to prevent more than 600,000 registered voters – a lot of them black or Hispanic – from losing access to the ballot box if the New Orleans court didn’t act by Wednesday.
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In a 68-page dissent, Circuit Judges Edith Jones, E. Grady Jolly, Jerry Smith, Edith Brown Clement and Priscilla Owen, wrote: “As with many judge-made “solutions, ‘ however, today’s results will backfire”.
First, the plurality opinion – that is, the one opinion that spoke for the most number of the 15 en banc judges – was written by Circuit Judge Catharina Haynes. Dissenting judges wrote that the “court is gravely fractured and without a consensus”. They would have upheld the trial judge’s 2014 opinion that such illegal objective has already been proven.
“The Court holds that SB 14 creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African Americans and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory objective”.
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Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod did not join others’ dissents, but wrote one for herself, joined by one of the other bloc of dissenters.
