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Attorney General to NAACP: Texas Voter ID Law is a Poll Tax

Posted byHoumanitarian
Complete video of the speech available here.

(Joe Holley, Houston Chronicle)
A day after a federal three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., began hearing a lawsuit involving a Justice Department challenge to Texas’ voter identification law, Attorney General Eric Holder told the 103rd annual convention of the NAACP on Tuesday that “we will not allow political pretext to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right.”

In his address to some 600 members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attending the convention at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, Holder noted that Texas in recent months has been at the center of the national debate about voting-rights issues. The DOJ opposed the state’s photo identification requirement for voting after concluding it would be harmful to minority voters, he said.

“Under the proposed law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID, but student IDs would not,” Holder said. “Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them, and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We call those poll taxes.”

Holder, the nation’s first African-American attorney general, alluded to recent studies that found 8 percent of white voting-age U.S. citizens lack a government-issued photo ID, compared to 25 percent of black citizens.

“The arc of American history has always moved toward expanding the electorate. It is what made this nation exceptional,” he said. “We will simply not allow this era to be the beginning of the reversal of that historic progress. I will not allow that to happen.”
(Read the full story at Houston Chronicle)

RELATED COVERAGE:
• AG Eric Holder Speaks At NAACP Convention On TX Voter ID Law (KUHF Public Radio)
• Eric Holder Speaks at NAACP Convention (KPRC 2 News)
• Eric Holder Vows to Aggressively Challenge Voter ID Laws (Washington Post)
• Latino Lawmakers say Texas Voter ID Law a Hardship (Houston Chronicle)

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