The Lawyers' Committee Team, litigating the Texas voter ID case
Dear Friends,
The Lawyers’ Committee has been litigating the Texas voter ID case over the past year. Today the Court heard closing statements in the case, which was tried from September 2-11. Our Board Member, Ezra Rosenberg, was one of the lawyers who presented an oral argument. We have provided you with a discussion of the case and Ezra’s closing statement in greater detail and links to a summary of his closing statement(see below). We thank you for your support and will continue to update you about this important litigation.
Today, the federal district court in Corpus Christi heard closing arguments in Veasey v. Perry, a constitutional and Voting Rights Act challenge to Texas's requirement that voters present one of six forms of government-issued photo identification. The court gave no indication of the timing of its decision.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, along with the law firm Dechert LLP, the Brennan Center for Justice, civil rights attorney Jose Garza, and attorneys from the NAACP represented the Texas State Conference of NAACP Chapters (Texas NAACP) and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House of Representatives (MALC). This case and other challenges filed by the Department of Justice and private organizations were consolidated into one case to stop Texas from enforcing that requirement.
Ezra Rosenberg, a partner of Dechert and member of the Lawyers' Committee's Board of Directors made a closing statement summarized here that focused on the evidence demonstrating that the law, SB 14, was adopted with a discriminatory intent and gave a voice to those who would be affected by it.
Mr. Rosenberg spoke of hard facts, citing statistical analyses from experts called by the plaintiffs that found:
- Blacks and Hispanics are between 1.6 times to 4 times less likely than Whites to have SB 14 ID, and
- Approximately 4% of all registered voters, or approximately 600,000 registered voters, lack SB 14 ID.
Mr. Rosenberg mentioned that plaintiffs also provided six witnesses from the legislature who testified to the discriminatory intent of the law, yet Texas did not produce one legislative proponent in court.
Mr. Rosenberg also noted that the proponents of SB 14, referred to by a district court as the country's "most stringent" voter ID laws, lacked a legitimate purpose to support the legislation.
Mr. Rosenberg added that the proponents claimed that the law is intended to cure election fraud, stop non-citizens from voting, and increase confidence in the integrity of the ballot. However, they presented no evidence to support these claims except for polls showing that the public supported government issued IDs in order to vote but that did not mention the specifics of any legislation. Mr. Rosenberg also addressed the state's claim that new voting rules are necessary to stop voter fraud. But the fact is that out of 65 million votes cast over the past 14 years in Texas, there have been, at most, two instances of the sort of fraud that SB 14 might have prevented.
In addition, Mr. Rosenberg noted that Texas legislators rejected a number of proposed amendments that would have made the photo ID law less strict, like expanding the forms of permissible ID and making it easier to obtain them.
Finally, Mr. Rosenberg did not only state facts; he spoke of the stories of voters who have felt the weight of voter discrimination in Texas.
"[My] friends in the graveyard for the right to vote, died too young, too bloody." -Reverend Peter Johnson
"[I have a right to vote in person] because I earned it." -Elizabeth Gholar
Best,
The Lawyers' Committee Team
