The Independent View: Supreme Court Allows Texas to Use New Voter ID Law

The Supreme Court said Saturday that Texas can use its controversial new voter identification law for the November 2014 election.

A majority of the justices rejected an emergency request from the Justice Department and civil rights groups to prohibit the state from requiring voters to produce certain forms of photo identification in order to cast ballots. Three justices dissented.

Early voting in Texas begins Monday.

The Supreme Court's order was unsigned, as it typically is in these situations. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented, saying they would have left the district court decision in place.

The law sets out seven forms of approved ID, a list that includes concealed handgun licenses but not college student IDs, which are accepted in other states with similar measures.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a six-page dissent early Saturday morning, blasting the court's decision to allow Texas to use its new voter ID law in the November elections.

She wrote:

The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. In any event, there is little risk that the District Court's injunction will in fact disrupt Texas' electoral process. Texas need only reinstate the voter identification procedures it employed for ten years (from 2003 to 2013) and in five federal general elections. The potential magnitude of racially discriminatory voter disenfranchisement counseled hesitation before disturbing the District Court’s findings and final judgment. Senate Bill 14 may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5% of all registered voters) from voting in person for lack of compliant identification. Id., at 50–51, 54. A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic.

The law was struck down by a federal judge last week, but a federal appeals court had put that ruling on hold. The judge found that roughly 600,000 voters, many of them black or Latino, could be turned away at the polls because they lack acceptable identification.

The Justice Department and civil rights groups that filed court challenges to the Texas law had hoped that it would be a significant test case of the continuing effect of the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court had nullified a key section of the Act in its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

Because the Corpus Christi ruling against the law is now on hold, it is unclear whether the judge will move ahead now with a separate review that she was asked to make, on the issue of putting Texas under a regime of court supervision based upon her finding of intentional racial bias in the voter ID law.