This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Saturday that Texas can use the voter ID law it originally passed in 2011 in the upcoming election. For the moment, that puts the kibosh on challenges to the law that have ensued ever since. It was a bitter defeat for Obama Department of Justice and other plaintiffs who had argued that the Court should stay the decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to enforce the ID law this election cycle. The appeals court had itself on Oct. 14 stayed a 143-page district court decision following a two-week trial saying the ID law discriminates against minorities, the young and the poor who are less likely than older, more affluent white voters to have the mandated forms of ID necessary to cast a ballot.
Early voting begins Monday in Texas.
The High Court's ruling, the fourth in three weeks affecting major voting law changes, was unsigned, as is usual in such cases. But Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a six-page dissent joined by her colleagues Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The law requires that, before voting, citizens must present a driver's license, passport, military ID or Texas gun license. Student IDs and tribal IDs of American Indians are among the forms Texas will not accept as valid for voting, making the law one of the strictest in the nation. Adam Liptak reports:
Those requirements, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5 percent of all registered voters) from voting for lack of compliant identification.”
“A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African American or Hispanic,” she added, adding that “racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact.”
Texas officials had argued that there was no evidence that the ID law would disenfranchise so many people, no proof any legislator supporting the law had a discriminatory intent and that the decision of plaintiffs to seek a trial in the lower court so close to the election instead of in 2015 was "opportunistic." Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who is favored to beat Democrat Wendy Davis, had labeled the lower court ruling "preposterous" and said Judge Nelva Gonzales-Ramos decision had ignored evidence presented by the state.
This isn't the end of the voter ID case. Neither the Fifth Circuit that stayed the Gonzales' ruling nor the Supreme Court that backed up that stay have ruled on the law's constitutionality.
More on the war on voting continues below the orange butterfly ballot.
One way to help improve turnout is to choose Democrats as state secretaries of state who will do what they can to increase rather than suppress the vote. You can help us do that by chipping to support five SOS candidates Daily Kos has endorsed.
Voting by mail is convenient, easy, and defeats the best of the GOP's voter suppression efforts. Sign up here to check eligibility and vote by mail, then get your friends, family, and coworkers to sign up as well.
• Arkansas Supreme Court tosses state's strict voter ID law: As we reported Wednesday, the court threw out the ID law on the grounds that it violated by state's constitution by adding a new qualification for voters besides the four that the document contains: U.S. citizenship, age 18 or older, Arkansas residency, registered to vote.
The decision could have an impact on the midterm elections just three weeks away. The close contest between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and Republican challenger Tom Cotton might be affected since voter ID laws tend to cut into turnout of minorities, young people, and the poor more than other citizens, and they tend to vote for Democrats more than Republicans. Arkansas is one of a handful of battleground states that will determine whether Democrats keep their Senate majority.
•
Wisconsin robocalls still mentioning voter ID requirement Supreme Court stayed for this election: In the wake of a decision by the Supreme Court to
vacate a decision by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay a decision by a district court to block implementation of the state's strict voter ID law, some robocalls going out to voters are reminding them they need to bring their ID to the polls. Given the stay/don't stay/do stay decisions in quick succession, confusion in the matter isn't hard to understand:
If you've received a robocall in the past day telling you to bring photo id to vote; you're not alone, and it's likely not a scam.
"It's sort of like a steamship and sometimes it can be hard to get them to change course," said Neil Albrecht from the Milwaukee Election Commission.
Albrecht explains it's likely from well-intentioned groups that forgot to cancel the calls.
•
Show white people photos of black people and they are more likely to express support for voter ID.
• Georgia SoS says 40,000 "missing voters" are in the system: Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele at The Root wrote that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp could not account for some 40,000 voter-registration applications that, if processed, would be mostly Georgians Latino or African American backgrounds.
Kemp, however, said his office has now confirmed nearly 40,000 of those voters are active and on the rolls despite accusations to the contrary. He said almost 10,000 more are on the state’s “pending” voter list, meaning those voters have been asked to provide more information to confirm their identities.
More than 6,000 other registration forms involve deceased people or felons, or could not be traced because they were missing key tracking information such as a valid address or zip code.
•
Bob Bauer describes differences between two judges over Wisconsin voter ID:
Judges [Frank] Easterbrook and [Richard] Posner [both of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals] square off in their opinions on the Wisconsin voter ID statute and their exchange comes down to two questions: the differences in the design and effects of ID statutes, and the significance of partisan motivation. [...] Easterbrook is casual, if not careless, in discussing the differences, and in his treatment more generally of facts. Posner insists on their importance. Easterbrook sweeps aside the question of political motivation, and Posner does not.
•
Jill Lawrence explains the costs and hassles of getting a voter ID.
• NYT profiles Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has made voter ID a big deal in Kansas.
• Poll shows big majorities favor restoring voter rights to nonviolent drug offenders when their sentences are completed.