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A divided federal appeals court has stayed a lower judge's ruling barring Texas from implementing a revised version of its voter identification law.
A panel of the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals voted, 2-1, to allow Texas to use the revised voter ID measure known as SB 5 for this November's elections.
"The State has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits. SB 5 allows voters without qualifying photo ID to cast regular ballots by executing a declaration that they face a reasonable impediment to obtaining qualifying photo ID. This declaration is made under the penalty of perjury," Judges Jerry Smith and Jennifer Elrod wrote in a joint order Tuesday. "The State has made a strong showing that this reasonable-impediment procedure remedies plaintiffs alleged harm and thus forecloses plaintiffs injunctive relief."
Smith and Elrod also faulted U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos for going beyond the scope of a previous 5th Circuit ruling instructing her to assess whether SB 5 had cured problems with SB 14, another voter ID measure Texas passed in 2011. Ramos ruled that original measure was tainted by an effort to discriminate on the basis of race and the measure signed earlier this year did not fix the problem.
"The district court went beyond the scope of the mandate on remand," Smith and Elrod wrote. "Simply put, whether SB 5 should be enjoined as opposed to whether it remedies SB 14s ills was not an issue before the district court on remand."