Federal Government To Drop Opposition To Texas' Strict Voter ID Law: Report

AUSTIN, TX — The Associated Press reported that a voting rights group attorney said Monday the federal government will end its challenge to the Texas Voter ID law — considered one of the nation's strictest that had been ruled unconstitutional by the previous administration.

Danielle Lang of the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center told the AP plaintiffs in the case were told by the U.S. Justice Department that documents would be filed to drop its opposition to the Texas law. Lang categorized the reversal as "extraordinary disappointment."

The move is a monumental reversal under new Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Obama White House, which joined a lawsuit against Texas in 2013. The Voter ID law in Texas under the Obama administration's DOJ was ruled as draconian to the point that it violated safeguards of the Voting Rights Act and, thus, unconstitutional.

As a result, state officials were ordered to allow the use of supplementary forms of ID to allow voters lacking a photo ID to cast ballots and to produce a series of public service announcements — in English and Spanish — to alert to the revamped law. A federal appeals court last year upheld the ruling, saying the Texas law discriminated against minorities and the poor, ordering the changes be implemented ahead of the November election.

Despite those changes, the Republican-controlled state government has lobbied hard since then to reinstate their preferred voting requirements, with Texas Attorney General filing legal motions asking for that reinstatement.

Voting rights advocates have complained about the Texas Voter ID law since its passage in 2011, complaining its strict rules were designed to exclude a largely minority voting bloc that tends to vote Democratic. As evidence, critics cited the allowance of a gun license (an item more often than not would be secured by a conservative voter) as one of seven acceptable forms of photo identification.

What's more, critics contended, the strict requirement of a photo ID targeted minorities who are often the group most likely not to possess them.

The Department of Justice intervened in response to those critiques. But Texas put the law into immediate effect after the Supreme Court limited the scope of the Voting Rights Act in its implementation, with the seven forms of government-issued photo IDs as part of its requirements. By November 2016, the law was rolled back after the DOJ's successful intervening to argue of its discriminatory intent.

The determination that the Texas Voter ID law did have a discriminatory result officially came as early as 2014, when U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi wrote a scathing 147-page report, as ProPublica and others have reported.

“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 purpose,” the judge wrote.

Much to the chagrin of the law's supporters, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans — widely considered the most conservative appeals court in the country — upheld Ramos’ ruling that the law had a discriminatory impact on minorities in July 2016, ProPublica noted.

As a result, Texas was compelled to offer voters a waiver to sign if they didn't have one of the required forms of government-issued ID.

But the Trump administration — seemingly intent on reversing every Obama-era initiative, from guidelines on transgender students' rights to construction of the Dakota Access pipeling — now seems poised to upend those previous rulings and determinations and reinstate the controversial Texas law.

Jeff Sessions, the nation's new attorney general, is not unaccustomed to Voter ID law controversy. His state of Alabama for which he served as U.S. senator from 1997 to 2017 has garnered its own share of controversy over its own voter ID law.

A lawsuit filed in 2015 by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund categorized Alabama's voter ID law as “simply the latest chapter in Alabama’s long and brutal history of intentional racial discrimination" in saying it discriminates against African Americans and violates the Voting Rights Act.

The state itself acknowledged an estimated 250,000 registered voters—around 10% of the state’s registered voters—lack a state or federal photo ID, which the law requires to vote. Black and Latino voters are consistently more likely than whites to lack photo ID, a reality as true in Texas as it is anywhere else in the country.

>>> Read the full story at Associated Press

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