Voter-ID laws get new strings

U.S. courts limit strictest rules

AUSTIN, Texas -- Federal courts have reined in strict voter-ID laws in Texas and Wisconsin, while a legal battle continues over North Carolina's rules mandating showing identification at the polls.

North Carolina's election rules may have an effect on Election Day in November -- but exactly where its voter-ID requirements will stand Nov. 8 remains to be seen.

What is coming into clearer focus is just how hard it could be for Republican-controlled states to enforce tougher polling-place restrictions that energized conservative activists when they were approved in statehouses around the country in recent years. That means an issue that looked to be a slam dunk for the right after the rise of the tea party in 2010 may actually be little more than an afterthought during this year's presidential election.

"An unelected federal court struck down key components of Texas' voter-ID law against the will of the people," said Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a co-author of his state's law.

More than 30 states have some form of voter-ID rules. But before this week the measures in only nine -- including Texas and Wisconsin -- were considered especially restrictive.

Republican statehouses have passed voter-ID laws in recent years, saying they help safeguard the integrity of the ballot box.

But civil-rights groups counter that the laws make it harder for poor and minority-group voters to cast ballots because they tend to support Democrats.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that Texas' requiring voters to show one of seven approved forms of identification at the polls had a discriminatory effect on poor and minority-group Texans and had to be corrected.

A lower court now will have to work with the state to ensure that anyone without approved identification can still vote in November.

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos has instructed Texas and its opponents in the case to begin meeting before the end of the month and submit a draft of proposed fixes by Aug. 5.

The Texas decision followed a federal court's blocking Wisconsin's voter-ID law and providing a legal workaround allowing people who haven't been able to obtain IDs to vote in the presidential election if they sign an affidavit explaining why they couldn't.

That order won't apply to the state's Aug. 9 primary, though.

"Courts are starting to recognize that states have taken the ball and run way too far with it in these voter-ID requirements," said attorney Deuel Ross with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is representing a black student at Prairie View A&M University who challenged the Texas law. College IDs aren't valid under Texas' law, but concealed-handgun licenses are.

Ross wouldn't speculate on the fix Texas will use to get through the November election but said a "serious look" is being taken at how the Wisconsin judge approved voters signing affidavits.

In April, a federal judge in North Carolina upheld much of that state's new election rules, including voter-ID requirements, shorter early-voting periods and the repealing of a measure allowing people to register the same day they vote.

But that decision came after last year, when North Carolina lawmakers relaxed the state's voter-ID law to let residents cast ballots even if they lacked proper documentation.

If a higher court doesn't intervene, the election regulations will remain in place in November.

North Carolina's presidential race could be competitive since Barack Obama narrowly carried the state in 2008 but lost to Mitt Romney four years later.

That won't be the case in Texas, where Republican Donald Trump remains the overwhelming favorite. More than 600,000 Texas voters -- or about 4.5 percent of all registered voters statewide -- lacked a valid ID under the state's law, a lower court found in 2014.

Romney beat Obama by nearly 1.3 million votes in Texas in 2012.

The effect of the voter-ID law could be more substantial in Wisconsin, which Obama carried by about 7 percentage points in 2012 and where 254,000 voters don't have driver's licenses or state IDs, according to the state's nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

That's about 7 percent of about 3.5 million registered Wisconsin voters.

A Section on 07/22/2016

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