Texas voting law stands despite challenges

[zoogs]

Great coverage from the LA Times. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act which subjected several states to federal 'preclearance', arguing that discrimination was over and such oversight was no longer necessary. Totally surprisingly ...

Hours after the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a core part of the Voting Rights Act, Texas put into effect a law that threatened to disenfranchise more than 600,000 registered voters.

The Justice Department had blocked the law two years earlier as discriminatory, and a three-judge panel in Washington agreed that it put “unforgiving burdens on the poor.” Texans who lacked driver's licenses had to take certified copies of their birth certificates to motor-vehicle offices to obtain new photo ID cards, sometimes a trip of more than 100 miles.

The law was blocked in 2011, passed in 2013 thanks to the SCOTUS decision, struck down in 2014 -- with that decision being upheld in 2015 -- and yet, it is still in effect, pending the state's ongoing exhaustion of the appeals process.

Texas is not alone among states' efforts to creatively influence elections. If the string of legal defeats continues, they will have nonetheless succeeded in their efforts for the 2014 elections, and may yet get their way in 2016.

 

[AR Husker Fan]

And here's the results from the appeal.

U.S. appeals court finds that Texas voter ID law is discriminatory

A Texas law requiring voters to show a government-issued form of photo identification before casting a ballot is discriminatory and violates the U.S. Voting Rights Act, a U.S. appeals court on Wednesday ruled.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a close decision among a special 15-judge panel, also sent the case back to a district court to examine claims by the plaintiffs that the law had a discriminatory purpose.

The New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit, which has a reputation as one of the most conservative federal appeals courts, asked the district court for a short-term fix to be used in Texas in the November general election.

 

[zoogs]

And here's some more results from around the country

Beyond Texas, now Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina, Michigan.

These efforts, by the way, pushed through by GOP-dominated state legislatures. The pre-Trumpian, sane GOP days for which we tend to pine for given the new context. Perhaps we shouldn't. There's a difference between suboptimal policy pushes (every progressive movement in history has tended to leave some of the neediest behind) and outright, concerted minority disenfranchisement.