The State of Texas’ legal team still plans to wrap up its defense of the voter ID law in federal court Thursday, but it will be a while before the two sides make their final pleas to the judge. Closing arguments were delayed Wednesday after a data discrepancy was discovered this week. Originally slated for Thursday, the closing arguments are rescheduled for Sept. 22 so some experts who provided reports for the trial can reanalyze their data. The trial is over Senate Bill 14, a law passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011 that requires Texans to show certain forms of state or federal photo identification before casting a ballot. Opponents say it forces an undue burden on minority and low-income voters, and supporters say requiring photo ID is already commonplace in American society. The data issue comes from a category of about 183,000 voters in the Texas voter registration database who have surrendered their driver’s licenses. The opponents’ experts counted those individuals as lacking a license, and therefore unable to vote if they don’t possess one of the other forms of approved identification.
The brakes were put on the trial Wednesday because many of those individuals — perhaps even most — are voters who traded their out-of-state licenses for a Texas license when they moved to the state. It was not readily known Wednesday how many people fall under that category, but attorneys fighting the law said not much is changing.
“At the end of the day, you have somewhere between 619,000 and 700,000 Texans who are still going to be disenfranchised by this law,” said Neil Baron, a Texas attorney representing one of the law’s challengers.
Full Article: Data discrepancy delays Texas voter ID trial – Caller-Times.