There are so many things wrong with voter-ID laws — 143 pages’ worth, you might say — that it can be hard to decide where to begin.
Still it’s worth trying once again, now that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has, predictably, reversed a federal judge’s takedown of Texas’s strict voter-ID law and allowed it to be enforced for the upcoming election.
The law, SB 14, requires prospective voters to show up to the polls with a government-issued photo ID, like a driver’s license or passport. On Oct. 9, U.S. District Judge
Nelva Gonzales Ramos issued a no-holds-barred ruling that SB 14 violates the Equal Protection Clause, the Voting Rights Act,
and the 24th Amendment, which prohibits poll taxes.
Judge Ramos found that more than 600,000 Texans, or about 4.5 percent of all registered voters, did not have the required ID; that a disproportionate number of those were poorer and minority voters, who lean Democratic; and that the law itself — passed by a Republican-dominated legislature, as all voter ID laws have been — was intended to make it harder if not impossible for these people to participate in elections.
Texas appealed, and on Tuesday afternoon the Fifth Circuit stayed the district court’s ruling, citing a 2006 Supreme Court case that warned against changing rules very close to an election. That case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, has been the apparent rationale for the justices’ recent decisions halting or permitting voter ID and other voting restrictions out of Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina. The challengers of the Texas law have appealed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court, which will likely uphold it under Purcell.
(Election-law expert Rick Hasen, among several others, has argued that all Purcell claims may not be created equal. That is, “there is less of a problem of turning OFF a voter ID law than turning it ON.”)
However the justices rule, it’s important to remember that nothing about voter ID is as it seems.
Supporters say it prevents fraud, and yet there is essentially no evidence of in-person voter fraud anywhere. To the extent fraud happens, it is primarily in absentee balloting, which is unaffected by voter-ID laws.
They claim the laws are meant to increase voter turnout, although a recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that in two states it studied — Kansas and Tennessee — voter-ID laws had the opposite effect.
They insist that they really do want people without photo IDs to be able to get them, and yet they seem unwilling or unable to muster any significant funding or resources to educate the public to that end.
For example, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has said that his state’s voter-ID law is supposed to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat.” With those words in mind, consider the following chart, an internal government document, which looks like the love child of Rube Goldberg and M.C. Escher:
In fact it is the creation of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, and purports to explain the relationship between the state’s voter ID requirements and those of the Department of Motor Vehicles. (In April, the state’s voter-ID law was struck down in similarly comprehensive fashion by a federal judge. While the Seventh Circuit reinstated that law, the Supreme Court put it on hold, since it was not already in effect.)
The story is not much different in Texas, where officials claim that they are doing their best to make a photo ID available to anyone who wants one — and who has the necessary underlying documents to get it, such as a birth certificate.
In Texas’s case, the solution is an “Election Identification Certificate,” which may be used only for the purpose of exercising one’s right to vote. Of course, the same thing that keeps large numbers of Texans from having the required ID in the first place — specifically, the lack of underlying documents that either do not exist or cost too much money and time for poorer residents to track down — also makes it unlikely that they will get the “free” EIC.
Unsurprisingly, Judge Ramos found, the state had issued only 279 EIC’s by the time of trial.
If officials really cared about making sure as many eligible citizens as possible could vote, they would be spending more time on genuine voter outreach and less time defending these discriminatory, dishonest and unnecessary laws in court.