Shelby County's Impact

We posted on two state efforts in Texas and North Carolina to enact election laws that would have required federal preclearance before last week's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder.  In Texas, the laws were denied preclearance by a three-judge federal court; those rulings, Texas v. Holder and Texas v. United States, were vacated by the Supreme Court two days after Shelby County came down, making way for the laws to go on the books.

I posted at the ACSblog on what this all means, and how it illustrates the stunning impact of Shelby County.  In short, the federal courts in the two Texas cases held that Texas's proposed voter-ID law and its redistricting plan for congressional and state legislative districts would likely have a retrogressive effect on the voting rights of racial minorities.  (One of those courts also found that Texas drew its redistricting map with a discriminatory purpose.)  Now that those cases are vacated, and now that the Texas AG has ordered the laws enforced, we'll soon get a fuller picture of the impact of Shelby County.

SDS