The battle over voter ID laws

The Obama administration is challenging the right of Texas to enforce rigorous new voting restrictions.

What happened

The Obama administration is challenging the right of Texas to enforce rigorous new voting restrictions, in the first stage of a major political struggle between the Democratic White House and Republican-controlled states. The Justice Department filed a request last week to reinstate its authority over Texas’s voting laws, which was removed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June. That ruling, striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ended a requirement for Southern states with a history of racial discrimination to get “pre-clearance” from the government to change their voting laws. Immediately after that ruling, Texas reinstated a voter ID law and a redistricting plan which had earlier been ruled discriminatory. But the Justice Department is challenging those changes under a remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, which enables it to block new voter laws if it can prove they reduce minority voting. Texas Gov. Rick Perry called the Justice Department’s lawsuit “an end run around the Supreme Court.”

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