Al Jazeera America NewsDaily
With the midterm elections just over two weeks away, rulings on stricter voter ID laws have volleyed back and forth in federal courts.
Last week U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos struck down a Texas law that required voters to show photo IDs at polling sites. Ramos called the law unconstitutional, saying it intentionally discriminated against minorities. Then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit put this decision on hold, citing a lack of time to train poll workers.
Critics say the law will prevent some 600,000 Texans from casting their ballots on Election Day. Republicans who support the law say it’s necessary to prevent voter fraud, saying the numbers cited by opponents are unfounded.
A similar debate is brewing in Wisconsin over its new voter ID law. Last winter the state legislature passed new rules on eligible IDs that opponents say will directly affect minorities and low-income voters who may not have valid identification. Last week the Supreme Court stayed the Wisconsin law, on grounds similar to those cited by the 5th Circuit.
In addition to Texas’ and Wisconsin’s, the Supreme Court has weighed in on voting laws in North Carolina, Ohio, Arkansas, Arizona and Kansas.
During Al Jazeera America’s Sunday night segment The Week Ahead, Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, told Randall Pinkston that voter ID requirements are a partisan issue.
“The one fact that we can’t escape is that these ID laws only go into effect in states that have Republican control of the state legislature and Republican governors,” Issacharoff said. “This is a partisan divide right now on how it easy it should be to vote in this country.”
Thirty-one states have laws in effect that require voters to show some form of identification at the polls. Seven states — including Kansas, North Carolina and Texas — have implemented strict photo ID requirements. All these laws were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures.
“We have a polarized population,” Issacharoff said. “We have more polarized political parties. Turnout is the game. And so the Democrats try to enhance the ability to turn out, and Republicans have locked into a strategy of trying to suppress turnout.”
Recently, a group of Democratic senators asked the Government Accountability Office to analyze the effects of voter ID laws during the 2012 elections. The GAO found that voter turnout decreased in the states that imposed stricter laws.
The study focused on Kansas, where turnout dropped 1.9 percent compared with the previous election cycle, and Tennessee, where turnout fell by 2.2 percent.
Also appearing on The Week Ahead was Liz Kennedy, counsel for the public policy think tank Demos. She described how North Carolina passed a bill that repealed its same-day voter registration programs, made it more difficult to count provisional ballots and ended its program of preregistering 16- and 17-year-old voters.
“It’s the old ‘It doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes.’ At this point, it matters who’s telling us who actually can vote,” she said.
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