DISCRIMINATION?

Supreme Court Allows Texas Voter ID Law

Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissent.

Texas’s use of a 2011 law requiring voters to present photo identification before casting ballots was allowed by the Supreme Court on Saturday in an unsigned order that contained no reasoning. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the other hand, issued a six-page dissent. “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” serves to undermine “public confidence in elections,” she wrote in the dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Critics of Texas’s voter ID law say that up to 600,000 registered voters will be disenfranchised by the law, a disproportionate number of them black and Hispanic.