If a court ultimately finds that was the case, Texas could be punished and ordered to seek federal approval before changing future voting laws, said Houston attorney Chad Dunn, who also led the challenge to the law.
Advertisement
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has again struck down Texas’s controversial voter ID law, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Second, the judge is to reconsider the part of her 2014 ruling that the photo ID law was actually passed by the state legislature with the specific intent to discriminate against minorities in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
At the heart of numerous challenges – which include issues such as voter ID, early vote cutbacks and same-day registration – is a raging battle between Republicans who say they hope to fight voter fraud and improve public confidence in the election process and Democrats who say the true aim of several of the laws and procedures is to create a substantial burden on the right to vote, particularly for minority voters.
The dispute over SB 14 is likely headed ultimately to the Supreme Court, but other cases against other states’ photo ID laws are underway, and could reach the Justices earlier than the Texas case because of the heavy tasks still left for Judge Gonzales Ramos in Corpus Christi.
The activists then convinced a different federal judge that state legislators had intentionally made it harder for low-income black and Hispanic voters. “This argument effectively nullifies the protections of the Voting Rights Act by giving states a free pass to enact needlessly burdensome laws with impermissible racially discriminatory impacts”. With Thursday’s ruling, the 5th Circuit Court has now dictated that a lower court needs to revise this portion of the law and create a solution that opens the elector process to those who were previously barred from doing so. “This is a huge win for voting rights in Texas and across our nation”.
“We are evaluating all of our options right now”, a spokeswoman for Texas attorney general Ken Paxton told The New York Times.
The law was first passed by then-Gov. A concealed handgun license is allowed, but college IDs are not.
The judge rejected Texas’s claim the measure was needed to combat voter fraud, a decision upheld by the three-judge New Orleans appeals court panel past year.
Many other leaders also felt that Wednesday’s ruling was a vote against electoral integrity. Wednesday’s ruling did not immediately halt the voter ID law, which has been in effect since 2013.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in time for the November midterms ― despite the fact that more than 600,000 Texas voters lacked a valid form of ID under the new law ― and the law was in effect for the 2014 election cycle. If the court deadlocks, the 5th Circuit’s en banc decision holds.
Texas argued that opponents of the law had “failed to identify a single individual who faces a substantial obstacle to voting because of SB 14”.
Texas’s next step would be a last-minute request for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch also released a statement lauding the decision.
That panel’s ruling last August overturned a lower court’s judgment that Texas voter ID law was created with a racially discriminatory goal.
The Texas Legislature reconvenes in January, though, and could modify the voter ID law enough to avoid such a challenge.
Civil rights groups praised the court’s ruling after it was handed down on Wednesday. “The 5th Circuit’s full panel of judges now agrees, joining every other federal court that has reviewed this law”.
Advertisement
And, thanks to the work the Voting Rights Institute (VRI), a joint project of ACS, the Campaign Legal Center and Georgetown Law, hundreds of lawyers have been trained to litigate more cases like these bringing justice to voters across the country.
