On August 22, the United States filed a lawsuit in federal court in Corpus Christi, alleging that the Texas government photo-ID law passed in 2011 (and not yet implemented) violates Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, and the 14th and 15th amendments. The case is U.S.A. v State of Texas, 2:13cv263. It will go to a three-judge court. Here is the Complaint. The Complaint alleges that some Texas residents who don’t have the needed ID would be forced to make a round trip of up to 200 miles to obtain such an ID. The Complaint also points out that some of the offices that issue state ID’s are not open in the evening or on weekends, so that some applicants would need to miss work in order to obtain ID.
The 2011 law had not been implemented because neither the Justice Department, nor another federal court, pre-cleared the law. Now that the preclearance portion of the Voting Rights Act is effectively no longer workable, the Justice Department is using Section 2 of the Act. Section 2 applies to the entire nation and does not permit any state to pass a law that injures the voting rights of racial and ethnic minorities. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
How many millions of ILLEGAL folks in the USA which the robot party hack USA A.G. manages to ignore ???
The question is not how many illegal aliens there are in the US. Rather, it’s how many illegally registered voters are there (whether they are US Citizens or not, incidentally).
In Florida, in 2012, the answer to that question is…”You’re kidding, right?” Because despite all the racist rhetoric of the Republican Party, the state of Florida found only about 200 illegal registrations, out of just under 12 million legal registrations. That’s less than two thousandths of a percent. For fact and science challenged Republican readers, that percentage is about the same as the likelihood that Ann Coulter will get her own show on MSNBC. And it’s just about the right likelihood, too, that an illegal alien would risk deportation of himself or herself and their entire family just to cast one lousy ballot out of 12 million. The idea is absurd.
Nevertheless, to combat the possibility that these 200 or so people might vote (and not all of them were found to have actually cast votes, BTW), Republicans pass laws to make it more difficult for people to vote, just “coincidentally” crafted in such a way as to make it disproportionately difficult for voters who are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. And they rely on people like YOU, DEMO REP, to be duped into conflating the entirely separate issues of illegal immigration and illegal voter registration.
Nice work, sucker.