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Voting advocates scored a major victory this afternoon when U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa enjoined enforcement of Texas laws passed in the 2011 legislative session which require that deputy voter registrars be Texas residents and prohibited performance-based compensation for voter registration staff.
The restrictions had been challenged by the non-profit group Voting for America and various other plaintiffs in a suit filed early this year in federal district court in Galveston.
The court rejected claims of Texas that the new restrictions were required to prevent fraud, holding that "[i]f these practices did contribute to fraud, concrete examples of such fraud would likely exist from decades of experience . . . . But no such evidence was introduced for the Court to weigh against the harm to Plaintiffs."
The court also enjoined enforcement of existing provisions of Texas law which Texas interpreted as banning deputy voter registrars from "accepting or handling applications from residents of counties other than the county in which the person is appointed as a VDR," finding the requirement unconstitutionally burdensome. The court noted:
As Plaintiffs have pointed out, a VDR active only in the City of Dallas would need to be appointed in Dallas, Denton, Collin, Rockwall, and Kaufman Counties in order to legally accept applications from residents of all parts of the city ... The county limitation, by requiring both registration and training in any county in which a potential VDR wishes to submit applications, thus imposes severe time burdens and administrative expenses on voter registration activities.
The court also barred enforcement of prohibitions on "photocopying or scanning voter registration applications that have been submitted to a VDR but not yet delivered to the appropriate county registrar, so long as the information copied or scanned does not include" confidential personal information, such as driver's license or social security numbers.
In addition, the court enjoined provisions requiring that completed applications be delivered in person by a deputy voter registrar rather than by U.S. mail.
In its opinion, the court stressed the importance of voter registration drives in modern democracies:
Voter registration drives have played a vital role in increasing participation in the political process. This is especially true in minority communities with historically lower rates of voter registration. Census figures indicate that a significant percentage of African-Americans and Hispanics voting in the last presidential election registered through voter registration drives and other third-party voter registration activities.
But rather than helping to ensure participation in the electoral process, Judge Costa found that Texas laws had the opposite effect:
The result is that Texas now imposes more burdensome regulations on those engaging in third-party voter registration than the vast majority of, if not all, other states.
The laws in question are now blocked pending a full hearing and trial.
The court's 94-page opinion can be found here. |
