U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy has granted a preliminary injunction that bars Georgia from enforcing its new voter ID requirement in the upcoming Nov. 8 elections. The ruling bars the state from requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Here is a quick summary of the case, known as Common Cause/Georgia v. Billups:
U.S. District Court, Northern District of Georgia (Rome) 4:05-cv-00201-HLM
Summary: §21-2-714 requires an unnecessary and undue burden on the exercise of the fundamental right to vote due to the time, inconvenience and expense of obtaining a valid photo ID. That a valid photo ID costs between $20-35 constitutes a poll tax, which will have a disparate impact on African American voters. Moreover, the statute is discriminatory and violates the Equal Protection Clause because the requirement only applies to voting in person and not voting by mail through absentee ballots (except first time voters). The purpose for the law, i.e., to protect against voter fraud is a pretext since there have been no reports of voter fraud for voters voting in person, only through absentee ballots. Finally, the statute is overbroad and not narrowly tailored.
Common Cause and other groups filed the lawsuit because the ID provision constitutes a new form of poll tax, which disproportionately affects a narrow subset of the population - poor people. Here is an excerpt from today's
New York Times editorial page:
Critics of Georgia's new voter-identification law, which forces many citizens to pay $20 or more for the documentation necessary to vote, have called it a modern-day poll tax, intended to keep blacks and poor people from voting. A federal judge supported these claims yesterday and blocked the law from taking effect. Instead of continuing to defend the statute in court, Georgia should remove this throwback to the days of Jim Crow from its lawbooks.
Georgia Republicans, who get few votes from African-American voters, pushed a bill through the Legislature this year imposing the nation's toughest voter-identification requirements. When it was passed, most of the state's black legislators walked out of the Capitol. Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., urged the governor to veto it. Under the new law, voters with driver's licenses were not inconvenienced. But it put up huge obstacles for voters without licenses, who are disproportionately poor and black. Most of them would have to get official state picture-identification cards and pay processing fees of $20 or more. Incredibly - beyond the cost imposed on such voters - there was not a single office in Atlanta where the identification cards were for sale.
Republicans claimed the law was intended to prevent fraud, but that was just a pretext. According to Georgia's secretary of state, Cathy Cox, in recent years there have been no documented cases of fraud through voter impersonation. There have been complaints about the misuse of absentee ballots, Ms. Cox says, but the new law actually loosened the antifraud protections that apply to them. Clearly, Georgia Republicans supported the law because they believed that making it harder for blacks and poor people to vote would help their electoral chances.
