Judges Thwart Texas Efforts to Silence Minorities

by Pablo Ros  |  August 31, 2012

Two attempts by the State of Texas to silence minority voters were thwarted this week when federal courts in Washington, DC, ruled against the state’s new redistricting plans and voter ID law, calling them racially discriminatory.

Melvin Hughes, president of the Houston Organization of Public Employees (HOPE/AFSCME Local 123), which represents more than 4,000 municipal employees, said the decisions were “a prayer answered.” “It was a victory for HOPE and the workers of this community,” he said of the ruling to strike down the state’s voter ID law, which would have required photos for voters at the polls.

“There are quite a few workers in our union who don’t have IDs” and would have been turned away at the polls,” Hughes said. “There are lots of low-income areas here in Houston.”

Regarding the voter ID law, a panel of federal judges called it “the most stringent in the country,” and said its costs would “fall most heavily on the poor,” adding that “a disproportionately high percentage of African Americans and Hispanics in Texas live in poverty.”

A different panel of federal judges ruled earlier in the week that political maps signed into law last year by Gov. Rick Perry violated the same section of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5, which requires preclearance by the Justice Department of changes to voting qualifications or prerequisites to voting. In its ruling, the court said Texas had failed to prove that their new redistricting plans “do not have the purpose or effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”

The two measures, passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, were clear attempts to silence minorities, in particular the African-American and Latino communities that have accounted for much of the growth in the state’s population in the last decade. Hughes said Local 123 in Houston will continue to register voters and encourage them to go out to the polls in November and help re-elect Pres. Barack Obama.

“HOPE is pushing Obama because he’s going to help strengthen our union,” said Hughes, who works for the city’s Department of Public Works and Engineering. “Without Obama nobody is looking out for us.”