New York Times

Texas’ Strict Voter ID Law Is Left Intact by Justices

April 30, 2016

by Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday left in place a strict voter identification law in Texas, while leaving open the possibility that it would intercede if the appeals court considering a challenge to the law did not act promptly.

“The court recognizes the time constraints the parties confront in light of the scheduled elections in November 2016,” the Supreme Court’s brief, unsigned order said, adding that “an aggrieved party may seek interim relief from this court by filing an appropriate application” if the appeals court did not act by July 20.

The Texas law, enacted in 2011, requires voters seeking to cast their ballots at the polls to present photo identification like a Texas driver’s or gun license, a military ID or a passport. In a 2014 dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the law “replaced the previously existing voter identification requirements with the strictest regime in the country.”

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the law is racially discriminatory.

But the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, has never lifted a 2014 stay of a trial court ruling striking down the law. The stay remained in place after a unanimous three-judge panel of the court last year ruled against the law, though on narrower grounds than the trial court ruling.

In March, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the case, and it scheduled arguments for May. The court indicated that it would consider whether to lift the stay at the same time it considered the other issues in the case.

The Supreme Court had considered the stay once before, in October 2014, leaving it in place in an unsigned opinion that gave no reasons. In dissent, Justice Ginsburg suggested that the majority had been swayed by a desire not “to upset a state’s electoral apparatus close to an election.”

In their new Supreme Court application in the case, Veasey v. Abbott, No. 15A999, voters and civil rights groups challenging the law asked the justices not to wait for the full appeals court to act. Even a prompt appellate decision in their favor, they said, would come too close to the presidential election in November.

“There is an entire election administration apparatus that must be prepared prior to any election, including the training of approximately 25,000 poll workers,” the challengers said. By June, they said, it may be too late for Texas officials to change course.

In response, Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas told the justices that the voter identification law was needed “to safeguard the integrity of elections, deter and detect voting fraud, and promote public confidence in the voting process.

“The state and counties within the state have invested time and money to train election officials, create election materials and educate the public,” Mr. Paxton said.

“Any court-ordered change in election procedures that later proves unwarranted,” he added, “imposes an irreparable injury on the state.”

Justice Ginsburg, who stayed up most of the night finishing her 2014 dissent, said then that the stay “risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.” She was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The law, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5 percent of all registered voters) from voting in person 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.”

Texans who lack a required form of identification cannot easily obtain it, Justice Ginsburg wrote. “More than 400,000 eligible voters face round-trip travel times of three hours or more to the nearest” government office issuing IDs, she wrote, and they must generally present a certified birth certificate.

Birth certificates ordinarily cost $22. The state offers ones costing $2 to $3 for election purposes, Justice Ginsburg wrote, but it had not publicized that option on the relevant website or on forms for requesting birth certificates.

“Even at $2, the toll is at odds with this court’s precedent,” she wrote, citing a 1966 decision striking down Virginia’s poll tax.

The Texas law was at first blocked under Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which required some states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before changing voting procedure. After the Supreme Court in 2013 effectively struck down Section 5 in Shelby County v. Holder, an Alabama case, Texas officials announced that they would start enforcing the ID law.

After a two-week trial in 2014, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Federal District Court in Corpus Christi struck down the law on Oct. 9 in a 147-pageopinion. She said it had been adopted “with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose,” created “an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote” and amounted to a poll tax.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit promptly stayed Judge Ramos’s injunction. It said a change in voting rules so close to an election would cause confusion among voters and poll workers.