Texas officials have spent years in court fighting to keep their state’s controversial 2011 voter-ID law alive. The law, one of the toughest in the U.S., requires Texans to show some form of government-issued identification at their polling place. Under a court-approved August compromise with the Department of Justice, Texas must allow voters who show up without a driver’s license or other photo ID to sign a sworn affidavit stating that they’d encountered an impediment to obtaining the required documents before Election Day. On Sept. 20, the federal district judge who oversaw the August agreement denied a plea from the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Dallas and Hidalgo counties claiming Harris County clerk Stan Stanart and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton were effectively intimidating voters by publicly suggesting that people who filed affidavits could be criminally prosecuted if it turned out they’d been issued driver’s licenses or other IDs in the past. “If you sign that affidavit and you lie about not being able to get a photo ID, you can be prosecuted for perjury,” Paxton told Fox News on Aug. 18. The judge’s ruling was a victory for Stanart, an active member of the state Republican Party whose campaign website touts him as “the proven conservative leader.” Harris County, which covers Houston, is the biggest in Texas and third-largest in the U.S., with a population the size of Kentucky. Early voting in Texas starts on Oct. 24.
Stanart says he’s already compared lists of registered voters against state driver’s license records so that his staff will be prepared to spot any affidavits filed by people who should have had appropriate ID. “If we suspect that they’re doing it intentionally and doing it for fraudulent purposes, I’m going to be inclined to turn them over to the DA,” says Stanart, who worked in the county tax office before he was elected county clerk in 2010. “We will have chaos if we don’t have people that are willing to follow the law.”
Texas isn’t the only state dealing with last-minute changes in how voter-ID laws can be implemented. Over the summer, federal judges overturned North Carolina’s ID requirement and decreed that Wisconsin accept expired student IDs, as well as expedite IDs for voters who’ve had difficulty acquiring them.
Civil rights advocates say the threat of fraud is overblown. A 2014 analysis by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who’s now a deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division, found 31 instances of possible voter impersonation out of 1 billion ballots cast over 14 years. “One is more likely to see the tooth fairy standing next to Santa Claus at the voting booth,” says national NAACP president Cornell William Brooks.
Full Article: The Texas Voter ID Fight Keeps Getting Weirder – Bloomberg Politics.
