Supreme Court rules Texas can enforce voter ID law

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court allowed Texas on Saturday to enforce its photo identification law at the polls in the upcoming elections, reaching the opposite conclusion from a similar Wisconsin case a week earlier.

The order, coming two days before early voting is set to begin, completes a series of voting rights challenges that had come before the court on an emergency basis. The justices also upheld new restrictions on voting in North Carolina and Ohio that did not include photo ID requirements.

The order was not signed, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a six-page dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

"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 said.

The law is the strictest in the nation, permitting only certain types of photo ID at the polls. Gun licenses are included; college IDs are not. It was enacted to cut down on in-person voter fraud, but critics said only two people were convicted of impersonating others at the polls during a recent 10-year period.

A federal district judge in Corpus Christi had struck down the Texas law earlier this month after a two-week trial. Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos ruled it was passed by the Texas state Legislature in 2011 with a "discriminatory purpose" and could disenfranchise about 600,000 voters, a disproportionate number of whom are black or Hispanic.

Days later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit blocked Ramos' order from taking effect while the state appeals. That meant the photo ID requirement could be used in the upcoming midterm elections.

Unlike what they had done in the Wisconsin case, a majority of justices upheld the appeals court and left the photo ID requirement in place. In all four of the voting cases that came before them, the majority of justices attempted to leave existing procedures in place. The Texas law had been used in several minor elections during the past year, with turnouts below 10%.

Though the majority in emergency orders seldom gives its reasons, the justices appeared to side with Texas because the law had been in effect for a year, but not Wisconsin, where it was only recently reinstated.

And although it's never clear whether all nine justices participated in emergency orders, it's probable that the justices who upheld the Texas law but not Wisconsin's were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer.

Both the Texas and Wisconsin cases will go forward on their merits; the flurry of activity that ended at the Supreme Court this month affects only the procedures that will be in effect for these elections.

The Texas law was blocked by federal officials shortly after taking effect, under a section of the Voting Rights Act requiring mostly Southern states to clear proposed voting changes with the federal government. The Supreme Court struck down that requirement in June 2013, freeing state officials to reinstate the law.

The court's order was a defeat for a coalition of civil rights groups as well as the Obama administration, which had argued against the law taking effect.

"It is a major step backward to let stand a law that a federal court, after a lengthy trial, has determined was designed to discriminate," Attorney General Eric Holder said. "It is true we are close to an election, but the outcome here that would be least confusing to voters is the one that allowed the most people to vote lawfully."

"Today's decision means hundreds of thousands of eligible voters in Texas will be unable to participate in November's election because Texas has erected an obstacle course designed to discourage voting," said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican candidate for governor in next month's elections, had defended the law.

"The state will continue to defend the voter ID law and remains confident that the district court's misguided ruling will be overturned on the merits," said deputy communications director Lauren Bean. "The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that voter ID laws are a legal and sensible way to protect the integrity of elections."

Wisconsin's law also was passed in 2011 and used in low-turnout primaries before being blocked from further use by a state court. Then this year, a federal district judge declared it unconstitutional because it disproportionately affected black and Hispanic residents.

A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in September, in part because of last-minute changes made by state officials to ease the burden on those lacking the proper ID. The full appeals court deadlocked 5-5 on the issue, leaving the panel's decision in place. In that case, the Supreme Court saw fit to switch gears and block the law for next month's election.

In the other voting-rights cases, the Supreme Court acted differently:

• It allowed Ohio to eliminate one of five weeks set aside for early voting, as well as some evening and Sunday hours. All four of the court's more liberal justices dissented.

• It allowed North Carolina to eliminate same-day voter registration and discount votes cast mistakenly in the wrong precincts. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented.

All four cases are part of a broader national challenge by groups aligned with Democrats and minorities against laws tightening voting procedures passed by Republican legislatures. In a fifth case, the Arkansas Supreme Court this week struck down that state's voter ID law.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court could decide to hear one or more of the cases and rule on the broader merits of the voting restrictions.