Democrats like to use the South as the whipping boy about race -- perhaps it's a way of cleansing the part about the Democratic party being the party of the slave owners. In any event, the Texas law requiring photo IDs to vote now serves as the whip. And we end up with 5th Circuit decisions like the one in Veasey v. Abbott which has put the law on hold based on the possibility of racial discrimination. If there is any justice in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court should overrule that holding, but as Richard A. Epstein says about that, the odds are 4-4.
That said, photo IDs are somewhat hard to get in Texas. I was tasked with helping an elderly woman secure a photo ID so she could get a copy of her car title. And the documentation requirement is severe. A relative of hers was able to find a certified copy of her birth certificate, and without that we may not have been able to get the photo ID.
But here's the catch. She's a white woman. So the law really doesn't discriminate unless you apply the erroneous assumption that minorities have a harder time securing copies of their birth certificates than non-minorities. But I suppose that if you include illegal immigrants in the description of minorities, then yeah, there might be some difficulty.
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