On the
list of cases released Monday that the U.S. Supreme Court has chosen not to hear is the Wisconsin voter ID law. That brings to an end a nearly four-year legal fight. Attorney General Brad Schimel said the law would not take effect for the April 7 non-partisan election. Absentee ballots have already been mailed to voters for that election.
The law, one of the strictest in the nation, provides that eight kinds of IDs are acceptable to present when voting. This includes most student IDs, but not those from University of Wisconsin campuses.
A coalition of groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union had last year convinced federal district Judge Lynn Adelman in Frank v. Walker to rule against the law on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Right Act by disproportionately burdening Latino and African American voters. He wrote: "The reason Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, and therefore to lack a qualifying ID, is because they have suffered from, and continue to suffer from, the effects of discrimination.”
But the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently overturned Adelman. The Supreme Court let that decision stand Monday.
Thirty states now have voter ID laws with varying degrees of strictness. The only one still in major litigation is the Texas law. That one was originally blocked by the Department of Justice under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. But when the Supreme Court tossed out Section 4 of that law in 2013, it made Section 5 moot and Texas quickly imposed its voter ID law. But the Department of Justice soon filed a suit against it. Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog writes:
In the Texas voter id case, now pending before the 5th Circuit, we have a holding that Texas’s passage of the voter id law was the product of intentional racial discrimination. That’s a finding which should be very hard to reverse on appeal. [I]t provides an easier constitutional path for the Supreme Court to strike down Texas’s voter id law. The upside of that would be a Supreme Court decision striking down a voter id law on constitutional grounds. The downside is that other cases, like Wisconsin, do not involve intentional discrimination and so a Texas holding might not help very much outside of Texas. It would be an outer bound of what’s allowed and forbidden.
Suppressing votes is at the partisan heart of strict ID laws and citizen advocates like the ACLU and the Brennan Center have fought a good fight trying to defeat these efforts to make it difficult for the poor, people of color, students and the elderly from voting. But, except for the still-to-be-decided Texas case, the legal fight is pretty much over.
We still have to fight it at the polls, however. So it's now up to Democrats to spend the money needed to reach out everywhere to make sure that Americans least likely to have the mandated forms of ID do, in fact, have one in time for the next election. And to let them know who it was who tried to impede their participation at the polls. And to push for changes in the laws so that no-charge IDs are made available. It's not the ideal solution, but it's a necessary bow to reality and practicality.
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Bethesda 1971 has a discussion on the matter here.