Spotted on Democracy Docket:
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Today, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas denied a motion to dismiss Vote.org v. Callanen. The case, filed earlier this summer, challenges Texas’ “wet signature” law that requires individuals who submit their registration applications electronically or through fax to also provide a copy of their application with their signature — meaning signed with pen on paper. The complaint argues that this law unduly burdens the right to vote and targets voting advocacy groups such as Vote.org in violation of the First and 14th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and asks the court to prohibit its enforcement. The court already rejected one attempt to dismiss the case earlier this fall.
The court also rejected a motion to dismiss the case filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) that was joined by two county elections administrators. The motion claimed that Vote.org did not have standing to bring this case and that its complaint was insufficient. The court held that Vote.org had sufficiently shown that the wet signature law would cause harm to the organization’s efforts to register voters and the court may be able to provide the requested relief. The court also rejected the defendants’ arguments that there was no private right of action to sue and the plaintiffs’ claim fails because they did not allege any racial discrimination, finding that neither argument was supported by precedent. The case will move forward and all claims will be litigated to determine if the wet signature law is constitutional and in line with federal law.
My first reaction when I see something like this is to search through my archives for any past blog posts about it. Usually there is something, even in cases where I don’t immediately recognize the issue. I know I’ve heard of this lawsuit before, and sure enough I land on this post, about a federal lawsuit filed in San Antonio by a group including Vote.org over the state of Texas’ rejection of voter registration applications that did not include an “original signature” but instead an electronic one. But that lawsuit was filed in January of 2020, and this one was filed earlier this summer, in response to a bill passed during the regular session. I can’t find any further posts about the January 2020 lawsuit, and I seem to not have blogged about the one from this July. Oops.
My best guess here is that the initial lawsuit was dismissed for some reason – I can’t find any reference to it on the Democracy Docket webpage – and the July one was filed partly in response to the reasons the original one was tossed. I note that the first lawsuit had several other plaintiffs (the DCCC, the DSCC, and the TDP), while this one just has Vote.org associated with it. Or maybe it was withdrawn for some reason, with the same logic behind Lawsuit #2. If somehow that first lawsuit were still in existence, I would assume that it has been or will be combined with this one. Since I don’t see that on the lawsuit webpage (where you can see the original complaint plus two followup documents), I go back to my first assumption, that the 2020 lawsuit is no more. If someone reading this knows how to search for these things in the federal court system, please let me know if I’m mistaken in that.
Anyway. The point here is that allowing electronic signatures, which are common in all kinds of other legal transactions, would make it a lot easier to do voter registration. Which, of course, the state of Texas does not want. Note that the bill in question was a large one that did a lot of things – the initial text is all about recounts, and at first I thought this must have been the wrong legislation – but the “original signature” provision is in there later on. It was passed with bipartisan support, and I will just have to ask someone about it, because there must have been some good things in there for that to have happened. Be that as it may, we’ll see where this lawsuit goes.