Courts protect voting rights: Our view
Rulings strike down discriminatory laws.
With so much on the line in this fall's elections,
you'd think it's reasonable to require that people present a foolproof form of identification at the polls. And it is, so long as states make it easy and free for eligible voters to get IDs.
Yet there is ample reason to applaud rulings from four federal courts in the past two weeks striking down laws in Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and North Dakota that could deny hundreds of thousands of potential voters — mostly minorities, often poor or elderly — their most basic right under the Constitution. Taken together, the rulings provide further confirmation that these laws were more about suppressing turnout than about preventing fraud:
- First came the usually conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which ruled 9-6 that Texas' 2011 law requiring voters to have certain forms of photo identification discriminated against minorities. The law, which allowed concealed handgun licenses but not student IDs as acceptable forms of identification, was intended to prevent voters from posing as someone else — a problem the court noted had yielded two convictions out of 20 million votes cast over a 10-year period. Yet it could disenfranchise up to 600,000 people.
- Next came a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit appeals court, which went further in declaring that North Carolina's 2013 law didn't just harm minority voters but was enacted with that specific purpose. While less strict than Texas in its photo-ID requirement, the law eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting and cut back on early voting — provisions that the court said "target African Americans with almost surgical precision" and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."
- A few hours later, a federal judge in Wisconsin struck down parts of that state's voting law, such as restricting early voting to weekdays and limiting cities to one early-voting location. "To put it bluntly," District Judge James Peterson said, "Wisconsin's strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease," which he referred to as "mostly phantom election fraud." Several studies have found little evidence that such fraud actually exists.
- The most recent ruling came Monday from a federal judge in North Dakota who temporarily blocked the state's photo-ID law because it could disenfranchise too many Native Americans. He, too, cited "a total lack of any evidence" of voter fraud.
The upshot of these rulings is clear. Once further appeals are exhausted, more people likely will be able to vote. Because those burdened by the laws tend to be minorities or low-income, that should help Democrats from Hillary Clinton on down this November. Eventually, the Supreme Court, once it's back to full strength, could weigh in for the first time since 2008, when it upheld Indiana's photo ID requirement.
The flurry of ID laws was all too predictable three years ago, when the high court emasculated the most important weapon in the Voting Rights Act's tool box — a provision that forced states and municipalities with a history of discrimination to get federal permission before changing election rules. Gutting that provision opened the door for some jurisdictions to be egregiously discriminatory.
Texas and North Carolina quickly became the poster children. Both were governed by Republican executives and legislatures; those affected by the restrictions were overwhelmingly Democratic.
The threat to voting rights goes beyond these four states. Seventeen in all have new voting procedures in place for the November election, more than half of which are being challenged in court. Several of them — such as Ohio, Virginia and Arizona — could be crucial in deciding whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins the White House.
It's true that the judges in the North Carolina and Wisconsin cases all were named by Democratic presidents, and that all the Democratic appointees in the Texas case voted against the law. But four of ten Texas judges named by Republican presidents joined the majority ruling. The judge in North Dakota was named to the bench by President George W. Bush.
The debate, however, should not be about politics; it's about democracy itself. In America, age, wealth and ethnicity should not determine who can vote. Turnout in presidential elections, usually below 60%, is low enough already.
Ten years ago last week, Bush signed legislation reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act, which he said "helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy." He vowed to defend the law in court, which the Justice Department has done under Republican and Democratic presidents.
In the wake of these latest rulings, it's time for state officials to drop further court appeals. Candidates should spend their time on appealing for the votes of as many Americans as possible, not on looking for ways to put obstacles on their way to the polls.
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