How the Democrats are winning the voter ID law battle
theGRIO REPORT - When Republican-led state legislatures and governors passed controversial voting bills throughout 2011 and earlier this year, the provisions at first appeared a major impediment to President Obama winning re-election...
But an unusual coalition has emerged successfully against the laws. From the Obama administration, Attorney General Eric Holder, previously known more as a Washington insider and legal expert than civil rights crusader, started an aggressive campaign against the laws last year, likening them to Jim Crow-era discrimination.
Related: Eric Holder casts ID laws as ‘poll tax’
Civil rights groups such as the NAACP and voting advocacy organizations like Rock the Vote and the League of Women voters have joined forces. They worked around the Supreme Court ruling by filing lawsuits against these laws in state, not federal courts, citing constitutional protections in many of the individual states.
White Democrats joined black ones in opposing these provisions, turning a group of laws passed with little public notice in 2011 into a national sensation. While Obama has said little about them (and some of his campaign officials privately said the laws are as likely to affect conservative, elderly voters, many of whom don’t have driver’s licenses, as much as liberal-leaning minorities and college students), Bill Clinton spoke out against them at the Democratic National Convention. They were condemned in an episode of HBO’s The Newsroom and frequently on both MSNBC and CNN.
And the united opposition to the laws among Democrat activists has pushed the party’s governors, such as North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, to veto these photo ID laws in spite of their popular support.
And even Republican-appointed judges have sided against the laws in some of the lawsuits.
This strong elite opposition to the laws has resulted in them being struck down across the country. Using his power under the Voting Rights Act, Holder has blocked the implementation of photo identification laws in Texas and South Carolina, two states that are not electorally important but where a combined 30 million people live. And a three-judge panel that included a justice nominated by George W. Bush affirmed Holder’s opposition to the Texas law in ruling.
“Simply put, many Hispanics and African-Americans who voted in the last election will, because of the burdens imposed by SB 14, likely be unable to vote in the next election,” the judges wrote.
In March, a state court judge in Wisconsin struck down the state’s law requiring a photo identification to vote after a lawsuit from the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters. Two months later, in Florida, a federal judge struck down a GOP-backed law that imposed fines of up to $1,000 for groups who register new voters if they didn’t turn in the registration reforms within two days, eight fewer than the state had allowed before. Rock the Vote, which organizes young people to vote, had been among the groups to file suit against the law.
The Obama campaign itself won a lawsuit against a Republican-backed law in Ohio that would have eliminated early voting in the last three days before the election. And in Pennsylvania, the state’s Supreme Court has ordered a lower-court judge to review the photo ID provision and could strike it down if the justices feel the law is too significant a barrier to voting there.
Follow Perry Bacon Jr. on Twitter at @perrybaconjr
