We’ve recently had two great pieces of news for voting rights and the Rising American Electorate.
The full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Texas’s voter ID law, the strictest in the nation, is racially discriminatory in effect and, thus, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The ruling from the Fifth Circuit, generally regarded as one of the more conservative appeals courts in the country, didn’t strike down or halt enforcement of the voter ID law entirely, but the appeals court did order a lower court to work with state officials and voting-rights advocates to devise a remedy that would remove the racially discriminatory effect of the law, which some commentators believe will allow voters without ID to sign an affidavit.
Also, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman issued a preliminary injunction ruling that voters in Wisconsin who didn’t have one of the state-approved forms of government ID could still vote by signing an affidavit. Judge Adelman cited the difficulty some voters have experienced in getting the proper form of ID, saying that “likely thousands of eligible voters in Wisconsin” lacked ID and would thus be disenfranchised by the state’s voter ID law.
We’ve written before about Wisconsin’s voter ID law and how it was intended from the beginning to disenfranchise and suppress the vote of the Rising American Electorate — and that was borne out with reports that in Wisconsin, 85% of the voters whose applications for voter ID were rejected by the state’s DMV were African-American, Latino, or Native American.
These victories against vote suppression are great news, but the real news is that without these court cases, they would have been disenfranchising voters in this November’s general election, thanks to the Supreme Court’s action striking down the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. State legislatures shouldn’t get to choose their own electorates and disenfranchise their own citizens.
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