Testimony: Voter ID law rammed through, will suppress minority votes, says Rep. Trey Martinez Fisher

(In Houston, Attorney General Eric Holder promised the NAACP that his department will be aggressive in opposing the Texas law and other efforts to impinge on voting rights, and ”will not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right.”)

State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the 39-member Mexican American Legislative Caucus in the Texas House, testified that supporters of an idea that had failed in the 2005, 2007 and 2009 sessions seemed unusually eager to rush it into law in 2011. Every conceivable objection was raised, he said, including the fact that the law would put 750,000 to 1.5 million Texans who are otherwise eligible to vote at risk of being turned away for lack of an acceptable photo ID, many of them poor and minorities.

But “we were willing to gamble” on that, he said, a trace of sarcasm in his voice, “so that we could bring `integrity’ to a system that has only yielded one indictment and two investigations on in-person voter fraud.”

“I began to question what the purpose was,” Fischer said, insinuating that there might have been an overt motive to suppress minority voting – an allegation the state and the backers of voter ID strenuously dispute.

Fischer described an unusually combative atmosphere in the 2011 Legislature that left no room for critics of voter ID to persuade supporters to focus on bigger problems than in-person vote fraud, such as fraud involving mail-in ballots, which is far more common.

“We had a governor that wanted to secede. We had an echo chamber at the Capitol. We had a select committee on state sovereignty,” he recounted.

If the Justice Department can show that normal procedures were circumvented, the 3-judge panel is more likely to conclude that there were nefarious motives behind the bill. Fisher testified that efforts by voter ID opponents to stall the bill in the House Calendars Committee, by “tagging” – a common parliamentary tactic in Austin – were apparently ignored.

Fisher voiced oft-expressed concerns about how hard it would be for poor and rural Texans to get an ID. “In West Texas, some people would have a 200-mile round-trip drive” to the nearest DPS office, he said, noting that 70 of 254 counties lack a state office at which to obtain a drivers license or alternative voter ID card. Even in San Antonio, which has three such offices, lines can take 2 hours and weekday, daytime-only office hours mean a person without a car might face a hard choice about taking time off from work just to get a document needed to vote.

The state will call more expert witnesses Wednesday but for now, has passed to the Justice Department. After a lunch break, Fischer will return to the stand, followed by state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas.

Holder’s comments to the NAACP echoed Fischer’s testimony. Under the Texas law, he said in Houston, “many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them — and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them.”