Just to note a few items of importance regarding voter photo ID laws in the US:
Until about a decade ago, few states had additional requirements for voting than set forth in federal law, namely, a first-time voter who registered by mail had to present any one of several possible forms of ID, which could include a utility bill with one's name on it or a bank statement. Indiana was the first state to enact a photo ID law, which was upheld in
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-21.pdf For a variety of reasons this was a bad test-case for such laws. In large part, the Court upheld the law because petitioners had not sufficiently developed the record. Not one person was identified at trial in District court who had been or would be unable to vote because of the law or whose right to vote was unduly burdened. The judge estimated (somehow) that at the time of enactment of the law about 43,000 Indiana residents did not a drivers license, which translates to about 99% of eligible voters already having a qualifying photo ID.
Petitioners did not challenge the law on grounds of violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is the enforcement effort authorized by the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting laws that result in the denial or abridgement of the the right to vote on account of race or color. The right to vote, of course, entails the process of registration, information on how to register and poll locations, access to a voting booth, the whole shebang that culminates in a person being allowed to cast a ballot and have it counted. And perhaps Indiana's law does not deliver any racially or ethnically discriminatory impact. Petitioners didn't address any issue of the race or ethnicity of those without a photo ID.
The case challenging the 2011 voter ID law in Texas presents a sharp contrast to
Crawford in many ways. After an
en banc hearing, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the District court's holding that this law (SB 14) violates Section 2's disparate impact provision.
Among the factors by which the courts reached their conclusion of a Section 2 violation was the fact of the most recent census showing what the District court termed a “seismic demographic shift” entailing a rapid increase of minority populations in the state. The District court noted that the party currently in power in the legislative and executive branches is “facing a declining voter base and can gain partisan advantage” through a strict voter ID law.
The Circuit court followed the District court in highlighting the procedural anomalies under which SB 14 was passed:
In this case, for example, the procedural maneuvers employed by the Texas Legislature and the State occurred, as the district court notes, only after repeated attempts to pass voter identification bills were blocked through countervailing procedural maneuvers. See Veasey v. Perry, 71 F. Supp. 3d at 645–46. At the same time, SB 14 was subject to numerous and radical procedural departures that may lend credence to an inference of discriminatory intent. See id. at 647–51. These included: (1) getting special permission to file the bill under a low number reserved for the Lieutenant Governor’s legislative priorities; (2) Governor Perry’s decision to designate the bill as emergency legislation so that it could be considered during the first sixty days of the legislative session; (3) suspending the two-thirds rule regarding the number of votes required to make SB 14 a “special order”; (4) allowing the bill to bypass the ordinary committee process in the Texas House and Senate; (5) passing SB 14 with an unverified $2 million fiscal note despite the prohibition on doing so in the 2011 legislative session due to a $27 million budget shortfall; (6) cutting debate short to enable a three-day passage through the Senate; and (7) passing resolutions to allow the conference committee to add provisions to SB 14, contrary to the Legislature’s rules and normal practice. See id. at 647–53. Such treatment was virtually unprecedented.[22]
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/14/14-41127-CV3.pdf
The courts both pointed out that in the same session in which SB 14 was passed, the legislature violated the Voting Rights Act by passing two redistricting plans that were found to have a retrogressive or racially discriminatory impact.
The Circuit noted the facts of the disparate impact analysis of SB 14 that were presented at trial:
2. SB 14’s Disparate Impact
The district court found that 608,470 registered voters, or 4.5% of all registered voters in Texas, lack SB 14 ID.
Veasey v. Perry, 71 F. Supp. 3d at 659. Of those, 534,512 voters did not qualify for a disability exemption from SB 14’s requirements.
Id. The latter figure, which was derived by comparing the Texas Election Management System with databases containing evidence of who possesses SB 14 ID, is known as the “No-Match List.”[42]
Id.
(a) Expert Analyses of SB 14’s Impact
Plaintiffs’ experts relied on four distinct methods of analysis to determine the races of those on the No-Match List.[43]
Id. at 660–62. Those included: (1) ecological regression analysis, (2) homogenous block group analysis, (3) comparing the No-Match List to a Spanish Surname Voter Registration list, and (4) reliance on data provided by Catalist LLC, a company that compiles election data.
Id. at 661. The ecological regression analysis performed by Dr. Stephen Ansolabehere, an expert in American electoral politics and statistical methods in political science, which compared the No-Match List with census data, revealed that Hispanic registered voters and Black registered voters were respectively 195% and 305% more likely than their Anglo peers to lack SB 14 ID.
Id. According to Dr. Ansolabehere, this disparity is “statistically significant and ‘highly unlikely to have arisen by chance.’”
Id. The homogenous block group analysis yielded similar results, and other experts arrived at similar conclusions.
Id. at 661–62. These statistical analyses of the No-Match List were corroborated by a survey of over 2,300 eligible Texas voters, which concluded that Blacks were 1.78 times more likely than Whites, and Latinos 2.42 times more likely, to lack SB 14 ID.
Id.
[. . .]
The district court thus credited the testimony and analyses of Plaintiffs’ three experts, each of which found that SB 14 disparately impacts African-American and Hispanic registered voters in Texas.
Id. at 663.
The district court likewise concluded that SB 14 disproportionately impacts the poor, who are disproportionately minorities.
Id. at 664–65. It credited expert testimony that 21.4% of eligible voters earning less than $20,000 per year lack SB 14 ID, compared to only 2.6% of voters earning between $100,000 and $150,000 per year.
Id. at 664. Lower income respondents were also more likely to lack the underlying documents to get an EIC [Election Identification Certificate].
Id. Dr. Jane Henrici, an anthropologist and professorial lecturer at George Washington University, explained that:
[U ]nreliable and irregular wage work and other income . . . affect the cost of taking the time to locate and bring the requisite papers and identity cards, travel to a processing site, wait through the assessment, and get photo identifications. This is because most job opportunities do not include paid sick or other paid leave; taking off from work means lost income. Employed low-income Texans not already in possession of such documents will struggle to afford income loss from the unpaid time needed to get photo identification.
Id. (alteration in original).
Furthermore, the court found that the poor are less likely to avail themselves of services that require ID, such as obtaining credit and other financial services.
Id. They are also less likely to own vehicles and are therefore more likely to rely on public transportation.
Id. at 665, 672–73. As a result, the poor are less likely to have a driver’s license and face greater obstacles in obtaining photo identification. Id. Even obtaining an EIC poses an obstacle--the district court credited evidence that hundreds of thousands of voters face round-trip travel times of 90 minutes or more to the nearest location issuing EICs.
Id. at 672. Of eligible voters without access to a vehicle, a large percentage faced trips of three hours or more to obtain an EIC.[44]
Id.
The individual Plaintiffs testified that they faced many specific burdens in attempting to obtain SB 14 ID or vote. The district court found that “[t]he Plaintiffs [d]emonstrate[d] the [i ]mpact” of SB 14 along several axes, including: (1) the difficulty of obtaining an EIC and voting with the proper ID because of Texas’s poor implementation of this program; (2) the cost of underlying documents necessary to obtain an EIC or other SB 14 ID; (3) difficulties with delayed, nonexistent, out-of-state, or amended birth certificates due to nontraditional births and errors on birth certificates; (4) long distances and other travel issues that made getting to a registrar and DPS office problematic for many Plaintiffs; (5) a strict disability exemption48; and (6) a burdensome alternative of voting absentee. See
id. Some of the Plaintiffs faced difficulties along multiple axes in attempting to get SB 14 ID and vote in person.
[. . .]
Plaintiff Bates faced a similar problem when she reported to the polls, as she was unaware that her existing ID was insufficient until she attempted to vote in person. At that point, it was too late to cast an absentee ballot, and she was not able to obtain SB 14 ID in time to cure her provisional ballot because she could not afford to purchase her Mississippi birth certificate at its $42 cost on her $321 fixed monthly income.
Id. at 649 & n.115, 665. Plaintiff Gordon Benjamin was not able to obtain an EIC at the DPS because he was unable to get his Louisiana birth certificate for the hefty $81 fee online.
[. . .]
Traveling to DPS offices to obtain EICs posed an additional obstacle for many Plaintiffs. The district court found that four Plaintiffs rely almost exclusively on public transportation. One of these Plaintiffs, Ken Gandy, faces an hour-long, one-way trip to reach the nearest DPS office. See
id. at 673. Plaintiffs Estrada and Espinoza use family and friends for transportation, but they each face “a 60-mile roundtrip ride to the nearest DPS station.”
[. . .]
The district court ultimately found:
SB 14’s voter ID requirements interact with social and historical conditions in Texas to cause an inequality in the electoral opportunities enjoyed by African–Americans and Hispanic voters as compared to Anglo voters. In other words, SB 14 does not disproportionately impact African–Americans and Hispanics by mere chance. Rather, it does so by its interaction with the vestiges of past and current racial discrimination.
Veasey v. Perry, 71 F. Supp. 3d at 698 (emphasis added).
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/14/14-41127-CV3.pdf
