Hang on to your hats, voters. With less than four weeks left before the general election, new voting restrictions were put on hold yet again. Keep reading for the latest voting rules in North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Voters in Wisconsin and Texas do NOT have to show ID on November 4, thanks to separate rulings this week. The rulings came after the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office report showed strict voter ID laws do in fact block voters from the polls.
“Both Wisconsin and Texas had claimed the new rules were intended to crack down on instances in which voters impersonate others at the polls. Such incidents are extremely rare, courts have found,” according to USA Today.
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked implementation of Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law for the upcoming election. “The Court majority’s one-paragraph order gave no reason, but the fact that this year’s election is less than a month away may have been the key factor,” according to Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS Blog.
Commenting on the federal district court ruling on Texas’ voter ID law, Attorney General Eric Holder said the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, was enacted with discriminatory intent, and has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Latinos and African Americans. The ruling vindicated the Department’s approach to aggressively enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“There is simply no good reason to reduce voting access — and individuals who seek to enact these laws should be called upon to justify their actions,” he wrote.
To add to the roller coaster ride that is election administration this election season, North Carolina voters once again cannot count on registering and voting early at the same time this year. The state’s same day registration law was one of many policies to be blocked under its highly controversial 2013 voting law. In a brief voting rights victory last week, a federal appeals court allowed for same day registration and out-of-precinct voting, but the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in Wednesday and overruled that decision. North Carolinians who want to register to vote must do so today, October 10, to meet the new deadline. Register to vote here.
North Carolina’s law and the array of last minute changes to voting laws across the nation reflect voting rights after SCOTUS’ decision to strike part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v Holder. That 2013 ruling “meant that states with the worst history of voting discrimination—like North Carolina—no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government,” wrote Ari Berman at The Nation. In North Carolina’s case, “the bill became far more extreme because of the Shelby decision and the federal government no longer had the power to prevent it from becoming law. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, ‘These measures likely would not have survived federal preclearance.'”
On Monday, Project Vote released the latest Election Legislation 2014: Legislative Threats and Opportunities report. While some of the report’s information has already changed (given the highly active lawsuits this election season), the fact remains that lawmakers are trying to push beneficial voting reforms, but few are actually making it through. With voting discrimination proven to persist, and with lawmakers still pushing problematic laws, it’s clear that voting rights protections should be the highest priority.
“Voter discrimination is still an entrenched reality across the country. But mounting lawsuits like those in Wisconsin and Texas would be unsustainable and untenable for most voters to replicate in their own communities,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in a press release today.
“Congress failed to act to restore federal voting rights protections in 2014 and we’re now facing the most unfair and disorganized election landscape in modern history. Without federal action, voters will be vulnerable and – all too often – excluded from our democracy.”
Photo by domisticat via Creative Commons license.