This afternoon the plaintiffs have filed a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Texas’ discriminatory photo ID law from being used in the upcoming elections. Plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to vacate the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to stay a federal judge’s decision last week to bar the law from being implemented in the upcoming elections.
“Texas’s photo ID law, enacted with a discriminatory purpose, is, as intended, the most restrictive, racially discriminatory photo ID law in the country. More than 600,000 registered voters, a disproportionate number of whom are voters of color, will be unable to exercise their fundamental right to vote in the upcoming election unless the Supreme Court steps in. This law, as the district court found, has no place in Texas’s democracy, except to exclude voters on the basis of their race, and that is unlawful and intolerable,” said Ryan Haygood who made closing arguments at the trial and directs the Political Participation Group at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation’s leading civil rights legal organization and a separate organization from the NAACP.
See the brief here.
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The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the country’s first and foremost civil rights legal organization. Founded in 1940 under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, LDF’s mission has always been transformative: to achieve racial justice, equality, and an inclusive society.
In United States v. Texas, consolidated with Veasey v. Perry, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and its co-counsel Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr LLP (WilmerHale) represent the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund and Imani Clark. Ms. Clark, an undergraduate student at Prairie View A & M University, a historically Black Texas university, previously voted in Texas using her student ID before Texas implemented SB 14. Ms. Clark does not have any of the limited forms of photo ID that Texas required under SB 14, including a concealed handgun license. LDF, the DOJ, and other organizations previously had blocked the implementation of the same discriminatory photo ID law in Texas. However, that decision was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights, which LDF defended before the Supreme Court.
LDF has been a separate organization from the NAACP since 1957. If our name needs to be shortened, please refer to us as NAACP Legal Defense Fund” or “Legal Defense Fund,” not “NAACP.”
