Friday, December 23, 2011
DoJ rules SC Voter ID law is dicriminatory
And they were able to use the statistics helpfully provided by the State of South Carolina.
The U.S. Department of Justice will block the voter ID provisions of an election law passed in South Carolina earlier this year because the state’s own statistics demonstrated that the photo identification requirement would have a much greater impact on non-white residents, DOJ said in a letter to the state on Friday.Given the villainous zeal that other Republican/Teabagger controlled states exhibited in passing their laws, this decision may bode well. At the very least the other states are vigorously scrubbing any statistical analyses they may have prepared.
The decision places the federal government squarely in opposition to the types of voter ID requirements that have swept through mostly Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Officials in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division found a significant racial disparity in the data provided by South Carolina, which must have changes to its election laws precleared under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because of past history of discrimination. The data demonstrated that registered non-white voters were 20 percent more likely than white voters to lack the specific type of photo identification required to exercise their constitutional rights, according to a letter sent to South Carolina and obtained by TPM.
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