In late May Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) signed SB14 into law requiring voters to present unexpired government issued photo identification to qualify to vote in Texas elections. Photo IDs must be current or must have expired within the last 60 days before election day. Starting January 1, 2012 Texas voters must present one of the following photo IDs to election clerks in order to vote:
- Texas DPS driver’s license or personal identification card,
- Personal identification card called an “election identification certificate;”
- US passport;
- US military ID;
- Texas concealed weapons license; and
- US citizenship papers containing a photo.
Earlier this month, 16 senators sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling for DOJ to examine whether the voter ID laws, which are the centerpiece of the GOP’s war on voting, violate the Voting Rights Act. Then, earlier this week, over 100 members of the House of Representatives wrote to Holder echoing this call for the Justice Department to take action to preserve America’s democracy:
Approximately 11 percent of voting-age citizens in the country — or more than 20 million individuals — lack government-issued photo identification. We urge you to protect the voting rights of Americans by using the full power of the Department of Justice to review these voter identification bills and scrutinize their implementation.
The Voting Rights Act vests significant authority in the Department to ensure laws are not implemented in a discriminatory manner. [...] [T]he Department should exercise vigilance in overseeing whether these laws are implemented in a way that discriminates against protected clauses in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act not only forbids state laws that are intended to specifically target minority voters -- it also forbids state laws that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others. Because voter ID laws disproportionately affect minority communities, it is difficult to see how many of the voter ID laws being pushed in GOP-controlled states could survive scrutiny under this law.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- signed into law 45 years ago -- was put in place to outlaw discriminatory electoral practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests and other Jim Crow election laws that prevented blacks and other minorities from voting.
It established federal Department of Justice oversight of election laws passed by certain southern states with a history of discrimination. Congress renewed the Voting Rights Act for another 25 years in 2006.
About the Voting Rights Act:
In a speech this week during his organization's annual convention, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous railed against restrictive state voting laws, likening their rise across the country to the days of Jim Crow.
"Our voting rights are under attack because we had a great breakthrough -- the election of a black president," said Jealous to convention attendees in Los Angeles. "It was followed by a great backlash."