Greg Abbott, the Republican attorney general of Texas, campaigned long and loud for the state’s new voter ID law. The law is a transparent effort to tilt elections in the state to Republicans by suppressing the minority vote, which is becoming more important as Texas’s demographics shift. So it was a rich irony that Mr. Abbott, who is running for governor, himself set off alarms as a suspicious voter the other day, along with a state judge, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, former speaker of the House Jim Wright and uncounted and unnamed others who tried to vote on a set of state constitutional amendments. The new law, passed by the GOP-dominated state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, masquerades as a tool to combat election fraud. In fact, as in other states that have enacted similar measures, there is no statistically significant — or even insignificant — evidence of in-person fraud at the polls in Texas.
That didn’t matter to Republicans, who are deeply frightened that Texas’s booming and Democratic-leaning Hispanic population will gradually loosen their grip on the state’s levers of power. By forcing through a new law that requires a government-issued photo ID as a condition of voting, they hoped to weed out black and Latino voters, who (along with the poor and the elderly) are less likely to possess such documents.
Full Article: Texas holds ’em voteless with new ID law – The Washington Post.