TEXAS Republicans have disenfranchised one-half million voters, mostly women, mostly Dems [View all]

[Coyotl]

Oct 26, 2013

"Texas's new voter ID law got off to a rocky start this week as early voting began for state constitutional amendments. The law was previously blocked as discriminatory by the federal courts under the Voting Rights Act in 2012, until the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the VRA in June. (The Department of Justice has filed suit against the law under Section 2 of the VRA.) Now we are seeing the disastrous ramifications of the Supreme Court's decision.

Based on Texas' own data, 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters don't have the government-issued ID needed to cast a ballot, with Hispanics 46 to 120 percent more likely than whites to lack an ID. But a much larger segment of the electorate, particularly women, will be impacted by the requirement that a voter's ID be "substantially similar" to their name on the voter registration rolls. According to a 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a third of all women have citizenship documents that do not match their current legal name.".* Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, Ben Mankiewicz and John Iadarola break it down on The Young Turks.

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from Ari Berman / The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176792/texas-voter-id-law-discriminates-against-women-students-and-minorities

..... Getting a valid photo ID in Texas can be far more difficult than one assumes. To obtain one of the government-issued IDs now needed to vote, voters must first pay for underlying documents to confirm their identity, the cheapest option being a birth certificate for $22 (otherwise known as a “poll tax”); there are no DMV offices in eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to the closest location. Counties with a significant Hispanic population are less likely to have a DMV office, while Hispanic residents in such counties are twice as likely as whites to not have the new voter ID (Hispanics in Texas are also twice as likely as whites to not have a car). “A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionably denies or abridges their right to vote,” a federal court wrote last year when it blocked the law.

Texas has set up mobile voter ID units in twenty counties to help people obtain an ID, but has issued new IDs to only twenty voters at the sites so far. .....

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http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/70-92.shtml

2012 - November (Presidential)
Registered Voters 13,646,226
Voting Age Population (VAP) 18,279,737
Percentage of VAP Registered 74.65
Turnout 7,993,851
Percent of Turnout to Registered Voters 58.58
Percent of Turnout to VAP 43.73

2010 - November (Gubernatorial)
Registered Voters 13,269,233
Voting Age Population (VAP) 18,789,238
Percentage of VAP Registered 71
Turnout 4,979,870
Percent of Turnout to Registered Voters 38
Percent of Turnout to VAP 27