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Court lets Texas use voter-ID law

 
An election official checks a voter’s photo identification at an early voting polling site in Austin, Texas, during elections in February. Early voting in the midterm election begins Monday.
An election official checks a voter’s photo identification at an early voting polling site in Austin, Texas, during elections in February. Early voting in the midterm election begins Monday.
Published Oct. 19, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court in a predawn order Saturday said Texas could proceed with its strict voter ID law in next month's election, despite a lower court's ruling that it was unconstitutional.

The court gave no reasoning for its decision, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters," Ginsburg wrote.

An appeals court had said it was too close to the election to stop what has been described as the nation's strictest photo ID law. But Ginsburg said the court had shirked its duty, since a district court after a full trial had said the law was written with discriminatory intent and could keep an estimated 600,000 registered voters from casting ballots.

It was the fourth time in recent weeks that the Supreme Court has been called on to decide whether changes in election laws approved by Republican-controlled state legislatures could be used in next month's midterm elections.

The states said the changes were made to combat voter fraud, protect the public's confidence in the electoral process and establish uniformity. Civil rights groups and Democrats who challenged the law said they were meant to suppress minority voting.

In each case, the court neither confronted the merits of the laws, nor did the majority explain its reasoning. The justices let changes go forward in Ohio and North Carolina, but stopped a new voter ID law in Wisconsin, where early voting had already begun.

The common denominator in each seemed to be that it was too late in the election year to require the states to change the way they had planned to handle the elections.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans used that reasoning to say the Texas law could be used in next month's election despite the findings of a district judge that it unfairly and intentionally targeted African-American and Hispanic voters.

The panel did not review the findings of Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos, instead saying it was following the Supreme Court's previous rulings that courts should not intervene too closely to an election once the rules have been set. Early voting in Texas is scheduled to begin Monday.

The judges said that while some voters may be harmed by the 2011 law, it would be a greater problem to make changes that might disrupt a statewide election.

The Texas law is considered to be one of the toughest voter ID laws in the nation. It requires the state's registered voters to show one of seven kinds of photo identification to cast a ballot.

Ramos agreed with civil rights groups and the Justice Department, which challenged the law, that black and Hispanic voters are more likely to lack the kinds of identification that Texas requires.