Texas Judge Recites State's History of Discrimination
A federal judge provided a scathing reminder of Texas' history of discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in striking down the state's voter identification law on Thursday evening. She had plenty of room to do it: Her opinion ran to almost 150 pages.
Most memorably, the judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, in Corpus Christi, said the law amounted to a poll tax.
In Texas, a poll tax was ultimately ruled unconstitutional in 1966. But for much of the 20th century, the state required that voters pay a $1.50 tax as a prerequisite for voting, a practice that suppressed the black vote well below the participation of whites at the polls. The State Legislature, in losing the poll tax, passed a requirement that voters had to reregister to vote every year, a measure that Judge Ramos characterized as a "poll tax without the tax." It was ruled unconstitutional in 1971.
She also pointed to Waller County, home to Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college. The county's voter registrar prohibited the university's students from voting unless they or their families owned property there. And she described how Texas had been found, in every redistricting cycle since 1970, to have violated the Voting Rights Act.
"This history describes not only a penchant for discrimination in Texas with respect to voting," Judge Ramos wrote, "but it exhibits a recalcitrance that has persisted over generations despite the repeated intervention of the federal government and its courts on behalf of minority citizens."
The Texas attorney general's office said it would appeal Judge Ramos's ruling "to avoid voter confusion in the upcoming election."
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