Texas’ controversial voter ID law went into effect on Monday and has already raised some hackles about its discriminatory impact on voters, particularly women (including a Texas judge) who change their names due to marriage. And women are not the only ones facing obstacles to securing the required documents—obtaining an ID in Texas has more hurdles than the Olympics.
Ari Berman of The Nation writes:
“Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a ‘poll tax’); there are no DMV offices in eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closest location. Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car). ‘A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,’ a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.
Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far.”
Last week, a federal judge expressed regret for his part in the Circuit Court decision (which was upheld by the Supreme Court in the famous Crawford v. Marion County ruling) to uphold Indiana’s strict photo ID law, a move that voter ID proponents repeatedly cite to support the “constitutionality and desirability” of voter ID laws. In his new book, federal Judge Richard Posner wrote that the law is “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.”
Perhaps we will finally see the impact that these harsh laws (enacted without the possibility of federal preclearance, even in states with shameful histories of racist voting laws) have on American voters by trial and woeful error.
byline: Erin Ferns Lee and Estelle Rogers
Photo by txkimmers/Creative Commons