ON AUGUST 6th 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a sweeping law that would do much to protect the right to vote for all Americans, including those who have historically suffered from discrimination at the polls. When it was first passed, Southern states were systematically suppressing the black vote, in some cases violently. Over the coming decades, the law was tweaked to ban all voting practices that effectively deterred certain groups of voters. But many presumed that time and racial progress would ultimately make the law unnecessary.
Alas, 50 years on, the law continues to be cited in a number of cases involving mischief at the polls. On August 5th the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down part of a controversial voter-identification law Texas passed in 2011, one of the strictest in the country, which the state argues protects the “integrity of elections”. Some 600,000 registered Texas voters—or 4.5% of the state’s electorate—became disenfranchised under the law, which allows only one of seven forms of photo ID in order to vote (eg, a handgun permit is allowed, a student ID is not). An analysis showed that black voters were 305% more likely than whites to lack the relevant identification documents; among Hispanic voters, the discrepancy reached 195%.
The appeals court panel agreed with a lower court’s ruling that Texas’s law had a "discriminatory effect". However, the appellate judges did not go so far as to conclude that the law was passed with the intention to discriminate. That distinction matters. An intentionally discriminatory law would be done away with in its entirety, but the panel's ruling means the state need only fix parts of the law. The panel suggests that Texas could, for example, reinstate voter-registration cards as acceptable identification.
When a federal judge struck down the law last year, the court argued that the voter-ID law was intentionally discriminatory. The judge cited past practices in the state involving poll taxes, secret ballots and literacy tests, all of which were designed to deliberately exclude non-white voters. But the appeals court was not convinced. “We recognise that evaluating motive, particularly the motive of dozens of people, is a difficult enterprise,” the judges write. Conjecture does not double as evidence, they concluded.
