Reuters: Most Read Articles: Justice Department wants renewed authority over Texas voting laws

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Justice Department wants renewed authority over Texas voting laws Jul 25th 2013, 15:51 1 of 7. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder walks on stage to greet National Urban League Chief Executive and President Marc H. Morial (not pictured) before addressing the 2013 National Urban League conference in Philadelphia July 25, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Mark Makela By David Ingram and Dave Warner WASHINGTON/PHILADELPHIA | Thu Jul 25, 2013 11:51am EDT WASHINGTON/PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a federal court to reinstate its authority over Texas voting laws, part of a new Obama administration strategy to challenge state and local election laws it says discriminate by race, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday. "This is the Department's first action to protect voting rights following the Shelby County decision, but it will not be our last," Holder said to a standing ovation at the annual conference of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization, which is meeting in Philadelphia. The Texas action was expected to be the first in a nationwide roll-out of voting rights cases aimed at counteracting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that invalidated a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Obama administration has been searching for new ways to oppose voting discrimination since a 5-4 conservative majority on the high court ruled that a formula used to determine which states and localities were subject to extra federal scrutiny was outdated. "Based on the evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented last year in the redistricting case, Texas v. Holder ... we believe that the State of Texas should be required to go through a preclearance process whenever it changes its voting laws and practices," Holder, the first black U.S. attorney general, told the group. The ruling freed Texas and select other jurisdictions from having to submit their voting laws to the Justice Department before they could take effect. The covered jurisdictions were mostly in the South, a region where officials had a history of denying minorities the right to vote. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the high court's ruling that the South had changed dramatically. Holder's Justice Department had used the process known as "preclearance" to block, among other laws, a new plan for congressional district lines in Texas drawn after the 2010 U.S. Census. Government lawyers and civil rights groups convinced a court that the map would have too few black and Hispanic districts. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who has since announced he is running for governor, said after the Supreme Court ruling that the redistricting plan could then go into effect immediately. State lawmakers ultimately approved a map that was deemed friendlier to minority populations, though state Democrats still criticize it. Holder's announcement was cheered by Texas Democrats and opposed by Republicans. "I'll fight #Obama's effort to control our elections & I'll fight against cheating at the ballot box," Abbott wrote on Twitter. "It is 100 percent appropriate and a good thing that the Department of Justice is going to pursue every angle to protect the voting rights for Texans who have historically been disenfranchised," said Jeff Rotkoff, a Democratic consultant in Austin, Texas. As a first step in its new strategy, the Justice Department plans to make clear it supports a pending lawsuit that racial minorities brought against the redistricting plan in federal court in Texas. If the court agrees the plan was racially discriminatory, then the Justice Department will ask the court to place Texas back in the preclearance process for an undetermined period of time, according to Holder's prepared speech. The Supreme Court in its June ruling left in place the preclearance process and most other parts of the Voting Rights Act, invalidating only the formula for states and localities to be subjected automatically to extra scrutiny. Some members of Congress have discussed passing a new formula that would comply with the Supreme Court's ruling, but they have not done so. (Additional reporting by Karen Brooks; Editing by Scott Malone, Barbara Goldberg and Maureen Bavdek) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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