[The Age | Text-only index]   

Texas tightens voter laws as demographics shift

Date: July 10 2013

The Texas Attorney General was so excited about the US Supreme Court's decision to strike down elements of the Voting Rights Act last month that he could not even wait to draft a press statement, instead taking to Twitter to announce the introduction of voting restrictions the very minute the finding was made public.

"Texas #VoterID law should go into effect immediately b/c #SCOTUS struck down section 4 of VRA today," Greg Abbott tweeted at 10.19am, following up in the following minutes with two more celebratory statements.

Introduced during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act forced nine states with particularly poor histories of using regulations to exclude black voters to have new electoral laws vetted by the federal attorney general before they could be enacted.

Since the June 25 Supreme Court decision many of those states — and counties within them - have rushed to introduce voting regulations that were either banned under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, or might well have been.

In North Carolina the Republican leader in the state senate noted, "now we can go with the full bill," in reference to laws to ban early voting and same-day registration, both traditional parts of get-out-the-vote operations among minority constituencies.

The Republican Mississippi Secretary of State, Delbert Hosemann, announced, "the process for implementation of Constitutional Voter Identification begins today," while similar laws passed but not enacted have since taken effect in South Carolina, Virginia and Florida.

For many Section 4 was always seen as an assault on the sovereignty of Southern states by a Northern establishment. Even so it was reauthorised by Congress five times, most recently in 2006 in a 98-0 Senate vote.

When it finally fell the Court's decision split five to four along partisan lines after a challenge by Shelby County in Alabama. In the majority decision the Chief

Justice John Roberts wrote that preclearance requirements are "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day''.

This is a statement that shocks many civil rights lawyers and activists who have already begun battling resultant changes in various states affected.

"As someone who was born and raised in the South the notion that we no longer need Section 4 is one that only someone who does not live in the South could believe," says lawyer Chad W Dunn, who has already started work on a challenge to the new voter identification laws in Texas.

He said Texas's voter identification laws were part of a Republican strategy to tamp down minority voting — which tends to flow towards Democrats - by three or four per cent.

Should it succeed the strategy should act as a short-term buffer against the demographic shift, which sees the number of minorities increasing against the white population. This shift helped underpin the historic election of Barack Obama, making him the first African-American president in US history.

The Texas voter ID laws would require all voters to present identification at the polling places. Passports and drivers licences would be accepted, as would permits for carrying concealed firearms. Identification passes issued by universities and colleges would not.

According to Dunn the law would see around 800,000 registered voters prevented from casting their ballots because of the expense of obtaining ID, the overwhelming majority of them black or Hispanic.

In a previous decision against the laws, a lower Texas court wrote, "The law will almost certainly have retrogressive effect: it imposes strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities in Texas are disproportionately likely to live in poverty."


[ The Age | Text-only index]