Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), the Georgia lawmaker who once described the Civil War as the “Great War of Yankee Aggression,” offered an amendment to a spending bill at 10pm last night that would have stripped the Department of Justice of its ability to enforce Second Five of the Voting Rights Act. Section Five requires certain areas with a history of race discrimination to “pre-clear” its voting policies with DOJ or a federal court in order to ensure that those laws do not target minority voters, and it was the basis for a few recent DOJ decisions to block voter ID laws.

Fortunately, it soon became clear that Broun’s attack on voting rights lacked support after Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a hero of the Civil Rights Movement who still bears visible scars from when he was beaten by Alabama state troopers for marching in favor of voting rights, reminded the gathered lawmakers why we have a Voting Rights Act:

It is hard, and difficult, and almost unbelievable that any Member — but especially a Member from the state of Georgia — would come and offer such amendment. There’s a long history in our country, especially in the 11 states that are old Confederacy — from Virginia to Texas — of discrimination based on race, on color. Maybe some of us need to study a little contemporary history dealing with the question of voting rights.

Just think, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was almost impossible for many people in the state of Georgia, in the state of Alabama, in Virginia, in Texas, to register to vote, to participate in the democratic process. The state of Mississippi, for example, had a black voting age population of more than 450,000, and only about 16,000 were registered to vote. One county in Alabama, the country was more than 80 percent [black], and not a single registered African-American voter. People had to pass a so-called literacy test. . . . one man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. Another man was asked to count the number of jelly beans in a jar.

It’s shameful that you would come here tonight and say to the Department of Justice that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar, to carry out the mandate of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. . . . . People died for the right to vote. Friends of mine. Colleagues of mine. I speak out against this amendment. It doesn’t have a place.

Watch it:

Broun withdrew the amendment after Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Dan Lungren (R-CA) also chastised him for trying to sneak it into a late-night vote, rather than using the normal committee hearing process.

WASHINGTON, DC — Texas Attorney General Greb Abbott (R) dismissed concerns that his state’s new voter ID law could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Texans, predicting instead that it will lead to an increase in voter turnout.

As many as 800,000 Texans currently lack a driver’s license or personal identification card. The likelihood that a Latino voter won’t have the necessary photo ID is as much double that of a non-Latino. Because of this disproportionate effect on Hispanic voters, the Justice Department blocked the Texas’ voter ID law under the Voting RIghts Act.

In an interview with ThinkProgress last week, Abbott dismissed these concerns, arguing instead that no one will be disenfranchised because of voter ID. Abbott went further, insisting that with voter ID in place, turnout will actually increase in Texas.

KEYES: Do you think that goal will be achieved that no one will be disenfranchised with the voter ID law?

ABBOTT: I do believe that both the safeguards and the structure put in place by Texas will ensure that it achieves the same thing that was achieved by Georgia and Indiana, and that is after these laws were implemented, you actually saw an increase in voter participation as opposed to a decrease.

Watch it:

Voter ID doesn’t just discriminate against racial minorities. It also hurts poor people and those who live in rural areas. First, for people who lack an official photo ID, obtaining one in order to vote is an unconstitutional poll tax. One such individual is Jessica Cohen, whose story ThinkProgress documented in November. After she lost her identification during a robbery, the only way to get a voter ID was to pay a fee to Missouri officials in order to obtain her birth certificate.

In addition, rural folks are hit disproportionately hard by a voter ID requirement. For many people living in rural west Texas, for instance, the nearest ID office is as much as 100 miles away. That barrier is all the more difficult because people who lack ID by definition don’t have a driver’s license. Unable to obtain a photo ID, they would be stripped of their voting rights under the state’s voter ID law.

It’s not difficult to see why hundreds of thousands would likely be disenfranchised in Texas if voter ID were reinstated. What is difficult to see is precisely how a major new barrier to voting will result in more Texans being able to vote, as Abbott asserts.

To learn more about voter ID and other suppression efforts, read CAP’s new report on recent attacks on voting rights across the country.

WASHINGTON, DC — “Dead voters in South Carolina!” grabbed headlines for weeks after the state attorney general took to Fox News to declare that he had unearthed evidence that their elections had been tainted by voters from the grave. Though this fabulous story was shown to be no more than a fable, Alan Wilson isn’t yet prepared to give up on the preposterous idea that South Carolina elections are plagued with dead voters.

After Wilson made the dead-voters charge in January, the State Election Commission investigated the matter, but was unable to find any evidence of voter fraud, much less zombie voters. Indeed, in 95 percent of the cases, investigators found a much simpler explanation for the discrepancies: human error. Some cases involved mistakes by poll watchers — such as marking down that Jim Abott voted instead of Jim Abbott, or simply stray marks that seemed to indicate an individual had voted when he hadn’t — while others were individuals who voted early and then died before Election Day.

ThinkProgress spoke with Wilson about the matter last week outside Congress. We asked for his reaction to the State Election Commission’s finding no evidence of voter fraud nor dead voters, despite his insistence to Fox News that “We know for a fact that there are deceased people whose identities are being used in elections in South Carolina.” Wilson remained largely unchastened, refusing to concede that the idea of dead voters in South Carolina is a farce. “It’s premature at this time” to say there are no dead voters, Wilson declared. “It’s my hope there are no deceased voters, but I do hope the General Assembly takes up the issue.”

KEYES: So when the election commission says that 95 percent of the cases are simply human error [...]

WILSON: It’s my hope there are no deceased voters, but I do hope the General Assembly takes up the issue and updates these archaic rules.

KEYES: But regardless of their findings, you think there might be?

WILSON: I won’t know until their investigation is complete. It’s premature at this time.

Last year, the state passed a voter ID law to require all voters to present a certain form of photo identification or be turned away from the polls. The Justice Department blocked that law last August for violating the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on election laws that discriminate against minorities. Indeed, if left in place, it could potentially disenfranchise 178,000 South Carolinians, hitting racial minorities hardest.

Wilson, who supports voter ID, has used the charade of dead voters as evidence of why the Palmetto State needs Without the prospect of voter fraud — which is far rarer than being struck by lightning — the “need” for voter suppression laws like voter ID fall by the wayside.

Last May, Florida radically overhauled its election law. In the name of preventing voter fraud, the bill slashed the early voting period nearly in half, shifted many voters to provisional ballots which often are never counted, and invalidated absentee ballots if the voter’s signature did not match official records.

Now, according to the New York Times, the law is already having an impact on voter registration, with the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote curtailing their efforts in the state. The law also requires third-party groups like those to submit registration cards within 48 hours of signature or pay a fine. Sabu Williams, the head of a local branch of the NAACP, experienced that part of the law firsthand during the past Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend:

Mr. Williams’s group registered two voters on the Sunday of the three-day weekend, and noted the time, as required by the law: 2:15 p.m. and 2:20 p.m. When the local elections office reopened on Tuesday, Jan. 17, the group handed the forms in. They were stamped as received at 3:53 p.m.

This resulted in a warning letter from Florida’s Secretary of State, Kurt S. Browning, who noted that the state can levy fines of $50 for each late application, with an annual cap of $1,000 in fines per group. “In your case, although the supervisor’s office was closed on Monday, Jan. 16, the 48-hour period ended for the two applications on Jan. 17 at 2:15 p.m. and 2:20 p.m.; therefore, the applications were untimely under the law,” Mr. Browning wrote. The letter said that “any future violation of the third-party voter registration law may result in my referral of the matter to the attorney general for an enforcement action.”

Mr. Williams said he could not believe it. “We’re out here trying to register voters, and I’m being threatened for doing it because we missed the time limit by around an hour — and we’re doing it on the first business day they were open!” he said. But he vowed to continue registering voters.

Not everyone, however, will follow suit. The League of Women Voters announced last year that it would halt its efforts in Florida if the bill became law, claiming an “undue burden on groups such as ours that work to register voters.” Heather Smith, Rock the Vote’s president, told the Times that, since high school teachers could be subject to fines under the law, “We just cannot put those high school teachers at risk.” While Gov. Rick Scott (R) said that he was only concerned whether the law “increase[d] the chance for people to stay active,” it is becoming obvious that this bill does the exact opposite.

Since parts of Florida are covered under the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice announced earlier this month that it would file a challenge to the law.

-Zachary Bernstein

Last May, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a vote suppression bill that radically overhauled the state’s election laws, reducing the time available for early voting, invalidating absentee ballots if the voter’s signature doesn’t closely match the one on file, and forcing provisional ballots for voters whose names or addresses have changed. At the time, numerous state publications and critics noted that this was most likely intended to cripple turnout among low-income voters, seniors, students, and minorities who tend to lean Democratic.

Because parts of Florida are covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, after Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed the controversial bill, it went to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for a pre-clearance review. Though the DOJ determined that several of the key changes were not valid under federal law, Florida filed a lawsuit seeking to preserve the law.

In a filing yesterday, the DOJ told the court:

As to the voter registration, early voting, and inter-county movers sets of voting changes enacted by Chapter 2011-40, amending Fla. Stat. §§ 97.0575, 101.657, and 101.045, respectively, the United States’ position is that the State of Florida has not met its burden of proof under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, on behalf of its covered counties, that these three sets of proposed voting changes neither have the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

In an earlier filing, the DOJ observed that the law, as written, would have a retrogressive effect on voting rights.

Since that may have been the Florida Republican’s intent to begin with, it will be interesting to watch the state to try to prove to the court that this voter suppression bill will not have the effect of voter suppression.

Earlier this year, Texas Lt. Gov. and Senate candidate David Dewhurst (R) told ThinkProgress that he thinks that it is unconstitutional for the Department of Justice to enforce the Voting Rights Act by preventing Texas’ racially discriminatory Voter ID law from taking effect. At a forum featuring Dewhurst’s fellow GOP candidates last night, the Republicans would-be senators lined up to join Dewhurst’s opposition to this landmark law

It’s time to do away with the nearly 50-year-old federal rule that let U.S. officials block a new state law requiring Texans to show photo ID to vote.

That’s what Republicans candidates running to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the U.S. Senate said during a forum Thursday night.

They called for repeal of the Voting Rights Act provision that requires Texas and other Southern states with histories of discrimination to receive pre-clearance when changing election laws.

“Right now, Texas is subjected to different standards than much of the country,” former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz said during the forum, hosted by the Dallas Bar Association. “I think we need to be fighting to ensure the law is colorblind and fair to everyone.”

It’s a strange definition of “fair to everyone” that says we should allow laws that enable a state to systematically disenfranchise minority voters. DOJ recently blocked Texas’ illegal Voter ID law because, like all Voter ID laws, it disproportionately disenfranchises minority voters. As DOJ determined, “a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack” the identification required to vote under Texas’ law.

The GOP candidates’ lockstep opposition to voting rights comes at the same time that the state’s Republican leadership argued that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional in a federal court in DC. Significantly, the Voting Rights Act was last reauthorized in 2006, after it passed the House 390-33 and the Senate 98-0 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, the state of Texas currently does not have any legally valid congressional maps. Because it gained four new congressional seats, it could not use its existing maps even if the Constitution would permit it to do so. The map drawn by the state legislature has not been “pre-cleared” as is required under the Voting Rights Act because of concerns that it discriminates on the basis of race, and an interim map drawn by federal judges in Texas was blocked by the Supreme Court late last year pending a more complete review of that interim map by the justices.

Many voting rights advocates feared that the conservative Supreme Court would use this case to make sweeping changes to the laws protecting voters, either by eliminating the judiciary’s authority to draw interim maps such as the ones at issue here or potentially even by striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act. Fortunately, those fears proved unfounded this time around. The crux of their holding is that the lower court erred in drawing these particular maps because they did not treat the state legislature’s preferred maps as a baseline and depart from that baseline only when necessary to rescue the map from illegality:

In [the challenger's] view, this Court’s precedents require district courts to ignore any state plan that has not received §5 preclearance. But the cases upon which appellees rely hold only that a district court may not adopt an unprecleared plan as its own. They say nothing about whether a district court may take guidance from the lawful policies incorporated insuch a plan for aid in drawing an interim map. Indeed, in Upham this Court ordered a District Court to defer to the unobjectionable aspects of a State’s plan even though that plan had already been denied preclearance.

In this case, the District Court stated that it had “giv[en] effect to as much of the policy judgments in the Legislature’s enacted map as possible.” At the same time, however, the court said that it was required to draw an “independent map” following “neutral principles that advance the interest of the collective public good.” In the court’s view, it “was not required to give any deference to the Legislature’s enacted plan,” and it instead applied principles that it determined “place the interests of the citizens of Texas first.” To the extent the District Court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of “the collective public good” for the Texas Legislature’s determination of which policies serve “the interests of the citizens of Texas,” the court erred.

The partisan upshot of this decision is that it is probably good news for Republicans. In an earlier case called Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Supreme Court largely abdicated oversight over politically motivated gerrymanders, thus enabling political parties to be as aggressive as they want in drawing maps that achieve their partisan goals. Because the Texas legislature is overwhelming dominated by Republicans, today’s decision requiring the lower court to use their map as the baseline in drawing an interim map will increase the likelihood that partisan gerrymandering intended to favor the GOP will remain present in the interim map the lower court eventually produces.

This post is the first in a three-part series on last night’s voting rights speech by Attorney General Eric Holder

Last night, Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library to give the most comprehensive explanation of the Obama Administration’s voting rights policy to date. The venue was certainly well chosen. Sixty years ago, when Holder was born, southern men who shared his skin color enjoyed no real access to the ballot box. Today, Holder himself is the chief guardian of America’s voting rights. In the America Holder grew up in, men and women faced fire hoses, endured beatings, bled under the blows of billy clubs wrapped in barb wire and spent night after night in jail as part of a decades long struggle to cast a vote. A few decades later, many of those same veterans of peaceful protest marched into the polling booth and elected Barack Obama president. What changed between now and then was the Voting Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson’s signature accomplishment and probably the most important civil rights law in American history.

Yet, as Holder explained, the very voting rights that he is now charged with enforcing are endangered by an all-too-common pattern of voter suppression laws in the states:

As Congressman John Lewis described it, in a speech on the House floor this summer, the voting rights that he worked throughout his life – and nearly gave his life – to ensure are, “under attack… [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent concerns about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.

Since January, more than a dozen states have advanced new voting measures. Some of these new laws are currently under review by the Justice Department, based on our obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Texas and South Carolina, for example, have enacted laws establishing new photo identification requirements that we’re reviewing. We’re also examining a number of changes that Florida has made to its electoral process, including changes to the procedures governing third-party voter registration organizations, as well as changes to early voting procedures, including the number of days in the early voting period.

Although I cannot go into detail about the ongoing review of these and other state-law changes, I can assure you that it will be thorough – and fair. We will examine the facts, and we will apply the law. If a state passes a new voting law and meets its burden of showing that the law is not discriminatory, we will follow the law and approve the change. And where a state can’t meet this burden, we will object as part of our obligation under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

It is both significant and reassuring that the nation’s top lawyer acknowledges the dire threat state voter suppression laws present to our democracy. Yet the sad irony is that, through no fault of his own, America’s first African-American Attorney General may see the worst contraction of voting rights since the Jim Crow era — and the threat comes from a much more powerful place than a handful of state governments.

Make no mistake, voter ID laws are unconstitutional. If the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and equal voting rights mean anything, they must mean that laws intended solely to disenfranchise particular kinds of voters — including many racial minority voters — must not be allowed to stand. Yet, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court largely abdicated it’s responsibility to strike these laws down.

Of course, as Holder notes, Section Five of the Voting Rights Act provides him with an important tool that can be used to block these racially discriminatory laws from going into effect in many states. Sadly, the Supreme Court probably has a plan to remove this tool as well. Conservative lawmakers are begging the courts to declare Section Five unconstitutional, and Roberts has strongly hinted in the past that he wants to give them what they want.

Indeed, forty years from now, it is likely we will look back on John Roberts and some of his colleagues on the Court and remember them for doing more to stand in the way of voting rights than nearly any person since Lyndon Johnson drove the knife into Jim Crow more than four decades ago.

After a federal court threw out Texas Republicans’ redistricting map this month because it discriminated against minorities, a three-judge panel today released a new map that will significantly boost minority representation in Congress.

Though the Republican-controlled Texas legislature was originally tasked with drawing the state’s new congressional districts, the map they produced was not only highly-partisan, but discriminated against the state’s burgeoning minority population. Texas, which is one of a handful of states that must get federal approval under the Voting Rights Act for new redistricting maps, saw its proposal nixed by the District Court of DC two weeks ago. As a result, three federal judges in San Antonio were charged with creating a new map for next year’s elections.

Their proposal today is far more equitable for Texas’ growing minority population, particularly Latinos. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund praised the new plan, calling it an “important victory for Latinos in Texas.” It creates a new “Latino opportunity district” in South Texas (TX-35) where Latino voters won’t be disenfranchised or split up, but rather enabled to elect a candidate of their choosing. In total, four new districts will boost minority representation.

Given the Texas’ Latino surge, it’s no surprise that the original map was thrown out in favor one that was fairer to minorities. Over the past decade, two-thirds of Texas’ population growth has been Latinos, while blacks accounted for another 22 percent. Whites increased by just four percent since 2000.

This population boom earned Texas four new congressional seats, the largest gain of any state. Currently, Republicans enjoy a 23-9 advantage among Texas’ 32 seats, but redistricting analyst Charles Kuffner did a thorough examination of the new districts and predicted that after the dust settles next year, Democrats would gain four seats. The Houston Chronicle, meanwhile, predicted a possible three-seat pickup for Democrats.

Interested parties have until Friday to comment on the court’s proposed map. Kuffner predicts the map “will be finalized by Monday the 28th, which is the opening of filing season, though I hear that could possibly get pushed back a day.”