Texas Voting Rights

Republican efforts to hold down voter turnout have continued unabated. Over the weekend, Texas officials successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the state to impose the nation's most restrictive voter photo identification law that will keep more than 600,000 legal voters from being able to vote.

The ruling by the court's conservative majority brought a scalding dissent from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She concluded her dissent this way:

"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. To prevent that disenfranchisement, I would vacate the Fifth Circuit's stay of the permanent injunction ordered by the District Court."