With the Voting Rights Project, we filed an amicus brief supporting plaintiffs in the State of Texas’s appeal to the Fifth Circuit, Veasey v. Abbott. In Veasey, the district court found that Texas’s voter ID law was unconstitutional under the 14th and 15th Amendments and illegal under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Texas appealed, based in part on the Seventh Circuit’s decision upholding Wisconsin’s voter ID law; the ACLU represented a group of plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case.
Our brief to the Fifth Circuit offered an in-depth examination of the Seventh Circuit’s decision, which we believe was decided wrongly, and urged the Fifth Circuit to reject Texas’s efforts to bring those errors into this circuit. On July 20, 2016, the court agreed with our position and declared the law illegal under the Voting Rights Act. The en banc panel sent the case back down for the trial judge to fashion a remedy before the 2016 presidential election.
Learn more at https://www.aclu.org/cases/veasey-v-abbott.
