Federal judge blocks Texas voter ID law

A Corpus Christi-based federal judge on Thursday blocked Texas from enforcing voter ID requirements just weeks before the November elections, knocking down a law that the U.S. Justice Department condemned in court as the state’s latest means of suppressing minority turnout.

The injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi is a defeat for Republican-backed photo identification measures that have swept the U.S. in recent years and have mostly been upheld in court.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday night blocked Wisconsin from implementing a law requiring voters to present photo IDs.

Republican Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office said it will appeal the injunction.

“The State of Texas will immediately appeal and will urge the 5th Circuit to resolve this matter quickly to avoid voter confusion in the upcoming election,” said Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for Abbott’s office.

Early voting is scheduled to begin Oct. 20.

Gonzales Ramos, appointed by President Barack Obama, never signaled during a two-week trial in September that she intended to rule on the Texas law before Election Day. But the timing could spare an estimated 13.6 million registered Texas voters from needing one of seven kinds of photo identification to cast a ballot.

The Justice Department says more than 600,000 of those voters, mostly blacks and Hispanics, lack eligible ID.

The ruling says the law “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 measure “constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax,” she said.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said, “The court today effectively ruled that racial discrimination simply cannot spread to the ballot box.”

Nineteen states have laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls. Courts nationwide have knocked down challenges — including at the U.S. Supreme Court — but the Texas case attracted unusual attention from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

He brought the weight of his office to bear on Texas after the Supreme Court last year struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, which had prohibited the state from enacting the voter ID law signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry in 2011. Democrats and minority-rights groups joined the Justice Department in the lawsuit.

The full Voting Rights Act had blocked Texas and eight other states with histories of discrimination from changing election laws without permission from the Justice Department or a federal court. Holder vowed to wring whatever protections he could from the new and weakened version and made Texas a first target.

But prevailing in court required proving intentional discrimination, and Texas maintained that opponents produced no evidence.

The office of Abbott, who is favored to win the race to replace Perry as governor, said minorities and whites alike supported the law in opinion polls. It also pointed to other states, such as Georgia and Indiana, where similar measures have been upheld.

But opponents slammed Texas’ law as far more discriminatory. College student IDs aren’t accepted, but concealed-handgun licenses are. Free voting IDs offered by the state require a birth certificate that costs as little as $3, but the Justice Department argued that traveling to get those documents imposes an outsize burden on poor minorities.

As a result, opponents say, Texas has issued fewer than 300 free voter IDs since the law took effect. Georgia, meanwhile, has issued 2,200 voter IDs under a similar program with more robust outreach.

Texas has conducted two smaller statewide elections under voter ID, and no widespread issues were reported.

Gonzales Ramos heard evidence in a federal lawsuit styled Marc Veasey, et al., vs. Rick Perry, et al., in which Justice Department attorneys and minority voters claim that voter ID violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The plaintiffs argue that the law was designed not to combat voter fraud but to neutralize the voting strength of a growing minority population.

Veasey is a Democratic U.S. representative from Fort Worth.

This report includes material from the Star-Telegram archives.

This story was originally published October 9, 2014 at 9:26 PM.