Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

This came out today from that same place__ Federal Court Holds Texas Voter ID Law Violates Voting Rights Act [Now Updated with Analysis]

Rick Hasen
Posted on August 30, 2012 8:59 am

You can read the unanimous 56-page opinion by Judge Tatel at this link.

The court has put in a scheduling order to address at a later date whether section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.

1. This is a careful, unanimous opinion from a three-judge court which rejects most of the social science evidence submitted by both sides on whether Texas’s voter id law imposes greater burdens on minority voters. Instead, the court bases its analysis on three basically uncontested facts: (1) Minority voters are at least proportionately as likely as white voters in Texas to lack the documents needed for Texas’s new id law (which the Court calls perhaps the most “stringent” in the nation; (2) the new i.d. law will put high burdens on poor people who lack id (many of whom would have to travel up to 200 or 250 miles at their own expense to get the i.d. as well as pay at least $22 for the documents needed to get the i.d.; and (3) minority voters in Texas are more likely to be poor. Using this simple structure, the court concludes that Texas, which bears the burden of proof in a section 5 case, cannot prove its law won’t make the position of protected minorities worse off. And the court suggests this was a problem of its own making: Texas could have made the i.d. law less onerous (as in Georgia, which the court suggests DOJ was probably right to preclear) and Texas could have done more to produce evidence supporting its side at trial, but it engaged in bad trial tactics.

There is four more statements under this one .. . .;)
http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39379