What a difference a day makes
by Tom Sullivan
The U.S. Supreme Court last night blocked implementation of Wisconsin's photo ID law for next month's election:
By a 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency appeal from civil rights lawyers, who argued it was too late to put the rule into effect this year.
Lawyers for the ACLU noted that the state had already sent out thousands of absentee ballots without mentioning the need for voters to return a copy of their photo identification.
It would be “chaos,” they said, for Wisconsin to have to decide whether to count such ballots now because voters had failed to comply with the new law.
Meanwhile in Texas, a federal district judge ruled the state's photo ID card law unconstitutional:
U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos equated the law, which passed the Texas Legislature in 2011 and has been in effect since last year, to the poll taxes of the Jim Crow-era South that were used to hinder minorities’ ability to cast ballots.
“The Court holds that S.B. 14 creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose,” Ramos’ opinion said. “The Court further holds that SB 14 constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax.”
While the Wisconsin and Texas rulings specifically addressed the ID sections of these laws, SCOTUS opinions on other voting restrictions have been a mixed bag:
Recent Supreme Court orders have restored voting restrictions in Ohio and North Carolina that appeals courts had blocked. The Ohio case concerned early voting, and the North Carolina case involved same-day registration and votes cast in error at the wrong precinct.
These court battles are far from over. The case challenging North Carolina's sweeping, new voting law does not go to trial until next summer. While SCOTUS blocked implementation of Wisconsin's ID provisions for November, federal court rulings on the law are still under appeal. Texas will appeal again, after "a long string of federal rulings" against its version. Texas immediately reinstated its photo ID requirement after SCOTUS eviscerated the Voting Rights Act's Section 5 pre-clearance provision in 2013.
As I observed yesterday, SCOTUS conservatives this week came down harshly on Arkansas for restricting a Muslim prisoner's religious freedom over an "exaggerated fear" about his beard. The same sort of exaggerated fear justices mocked in that case is the stated basis for photo ID laws across the country. Will SCOTUS' conservatives bring the same skepticism to bear in protecting voting rights as religious rights?