Justices allow Texas’ voter-ID law

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Saturday that Texas can use its new voter-identification law for the November 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.

The law was struck down by a federal judge earlier this month, but a federal appeals court had put that ruling on hold. The judge found that roughly 600,000 voters, many of them black or Hispanic, could be turned away at the polls because they lack acceptable identification. 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 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,” Ginsburg wrote in dissent.

Texas’ 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.

The 143-page opinion from U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos called the law an “unconstitutional burden on the right to vote” and the equivalent of a poll tax in finding that the Republican-led Texas Legislature purposely discriminated against minority voters in Texas.

Texas had urged the Supreme Court to let the state enforce the voter-ID law at the polls in a court filing that took aim at the ruling by Ramos, an appointee of President Barack Obama. Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who’s favored in the gubernatorial race, called Ramos’ findings “preposterous” and accused the judge of ignoring evidence favorable to the state.

The court had intervened in three other disputes in recent weeks over restrictions on voting access. In each case, the court neither confronted the merits of the laws nor did the majority explain its reasoning. The justices let changes go forward in Ohio and North Carolina, but they stopped a new voter-ID law in Wisconsin.

Arkansas’ voter- ID law was struck down by the state Supreme Court last week in a ruling that found the law violates the state constitution by adding a voter qualification — the showing of photo IDs — to the long-established qualifications set in the constitution.

Unlike that ruling, none of the orders issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in recent days is a final ruling on the constitutionality of the states’ voting laws. The orders are all about timing — whether the laws can be used in this year’s elections — while the justices defer consideration of the laws’ validity.

In each case, the court took issue with lower court rulings that would have changed the rules too close to an election, said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the Univer- sity of California at Irvine law school.

In seeking a short-term outcome that is the least disruptive for the voting process, the high court allowed restrictions that were already in place to remain in place in North Carolina and Ohio, while blocking Wisconsin’s new voter-ID law, which meant that up to 300,000 voters might not have been able to obtain IDs in the few weeks before the election, Hasen said.

In asking the Supreme Court to block Texas’ law in the coming election, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the court that the law has never been used in a federal election and it would be easy for the state to simply allow voters to cast their ballots without showing the disputed identification.

Texas countered that it has used the law for nonfederal elections and there has been no evidence that it has resulted in the disenfranchisement of minority voters. It also said Ramos’ finding that the state’s Legislature enacted the voter-ID law with discriminatory intent was unwarranted.

It noted that the Supreme Court validated an Indiana voter-ID law in 2008.