(Seth Stern/Washington Post-Bloomberg)
The Obama administration blocked Texas’s new law requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls, escalating a partisan dispute over voting restrictions. The U.S. Justice Department is using its power under the Voting Rights Act to halt the Texas law, saying in a letter to the state today that the measure may disproportionately harm Hispanics. The department in December blocked a similar law in South Carolina.
Voter identification laws were passed last year in eight states. Whether the requirements are inconveniences or barriers to voting is at the core of a debate between Republican supporters who say the laws will protect election integrity, and Democrats who oppose the statutes as attempts to disenfranchise minorities and the poor.
“Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card,” Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote in the letter to Keith Ingram, the director of elections for the Texas Secretary of State.
The Justice Department’s decision isn’t final. Texas and South Carolina have filed suit in federal court in Washington seeking permission to enforce their photo ID requirements.
The law’s requirements “entail minor inconveniences on exercising the right to vote,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said in his court filing on Jan. 24.
(More at Washington Post)
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