Ginsburg calls Southern states' actions in wake of Voting Rights decision ‘predictable'
The efforts of Southern states to forge ahead with tough voter identification laws come as no surprise to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ginsburg cited Texas’ decision to implement its voter ID law hours after the court struck down a key provision of the act as a predictable response to loosened federal oversight of elections in an interview with the Associated Press.
“The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn’t make any sense to me,” Ginsburg told the AP Wednesday. “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen.”
The 80-year-old Justice dissented from the court’s decision on the voting law and asserts that Texas’ swift response demonstrates a need to keep states with a history for voting discrimination from making election procedure changes without Washington’s approval, the AP reports.
Her comments preceded Attorney General Eric Holder’s comments Thursday, noted in a prior ABAJournal.com post, that the Obama administration will move to require advance approval for Texas and other places to change voter ID laws through a part of the law that was not challenged, according to the report.
