State’s defense of sorry voter ID law drags on (Dallas Morning News editorial)

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Published: 28 August 2013 07:27 PM
Updated: 28 August 2013 07:28 PM

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst complained that there is “no end to the tricks the Obama administration will play to undermine Texas.” Actually, it was the GOP-dominated Legislature in 2011 that undermined years of Texas tradition honoring the county-issued voter certificate at the polls. In substituting five different types of government photo IDs, lawmakers used the pretext that they were fighting rampant voter fraud, a lame excuse then and now for passing what federal judges called the strictest voter ID provisions in the nation.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott decried Holder’s political motivations in siding with Democratic groups, and we aren’t blind to those bedfellows. But neither were we blind to the utter failure by Republicans in the Legislature to prove their contention that long-standing Texas election laws were widely exploited by voter impersonators at the polls.

Striving to defend the need for the voter ID law, Abbott’s broadside at Holder mentioned a Brownsville woman recently arrested for allegedly casting five votes in one election. He didn’t mention that her scheme, according to the FBI, involved absentee ballots, not a voter ID conspiracy to trick poll workers and cast fraudulent ballots on Election Day.

Republican lawmakers all but proclaimed a crisis to justify support for the law, which has turned into a growth industry for special-interest and government lawyers, including counsel representing Dallas County. A U.S. District Court judge in Corpus Christi will sort through the thicket of claims ...

http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20130828-editorial-states-defense-of-sorry-voter-id-law-drags-on.ece

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