Supreme Court Allows Texas Voter ID

Steven D. Schwinn, John Marshall Law School

The Supreme Court today rejected the applications by the Justice Department and civil rights groups to vacate the Fifth Circuit's stay of a district judge's injunction against Texas's voter ID law, SB 14. The ruling means that Texas can implement voter ID under SB 14 in the fall elections.

We most recently posted on the case (the Fifth Circuit ruling, with links to the district court ruling) here.

The brief, unsigned order simply rejected the applications for a stay.

But Justice Ginsburg wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. Justice Ginsburg distinguished the Texas case from the North Carolina and Ohio cases, writing that "[n]either application involved, as this case does, a permanent injunction following a full trial and resting on an extensive record from which the District Court found ballot-access discrimination by the State." She also wrote that the Fifth Circuit didn't properly defer to the district court ruling, and that halting SB 14 wouldn't cause disruption or confusion in the election (the Fifth Circuit's principal reason for rejecting the district court's injunction).

Justice Ginsburg also reviewed the district court ruling striking SB 14, and noted that it failed preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (pre-Shelby County). She concluded,

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. To prevent that disenfranchisement, I would vacate the Fifth Circuit's stay of the permanent injunction ordered by the District Court.