Never has it been more important to vote in Texas than in 2014. Every state office is up for grabs this Election Day, which means that voters have a chance to really change something after the Republican-controlled legislature spent the last session eviscerating women’s reproductive rights – closing at least 30 safe, legal abortion clinics, enacting a 24-hour waiting period and, until last week, leaving only seven clinics open across the state. For good measure, Texas politicians gutted public school funding by billions and carved up voting districts so ridiculous that one – congressional district 35 – is a long, nonsensical sliver that stretches from Austin to San Antonio, 70 miles away.  The only problem is that nearly 700,000 of those voters who could change something ... might not be able to vote.  We are reliving the Jim Crow era in the United States – and nowhere more so than here in Texas. Ever since we became a majority-minority state in 2004, Republicans have passed law after law to stem the tide of demographically-wrought political progress. During the last two legislative sessions, seemingly every major law passed was created to disenfranchise people of color who, despite their numbers, are still two or three times as likely as white Texans to be unemployed, live below the poverty line, lack medical insurance and have low educational attainment. The new laws dismantling minority voting districts, cutting educational funds and closing down safe abortion facilities are being challenged on their constitutionality due to the disproportionate amount of hardship they pose for the economically disadvantaged who – surprise, surprise – are more likely to be Hispanic and African American.  The most definitive proof of the legislature’s antagonism toward minority voters came in the form of the Texas voter ID law, signed by Governor Rick Perry in 2011. It requires voters to present valid identification in order to cast a ballot, despite the fact that 796,000 adults (and 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters) in Texas don’t have the government-issued ID required.  A lower court judge in Corpus Christi, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, agreed that the law disproportionately targets Texas’s new majority: she wrote in her decision against the voter ID law earlier in October that it appeared to be created not merely in spite of its detrimental effects on the black and Hispanic electorate, but “because of” it. Then, over this past weekend, the US supreme court decided the state should be able to enforce the law until it can be heard in court.  The justices broke that news on a Saturday morning, forcing voting rights advocates to compete with day-long televised coverage of Longhorn and Aggie football – the two real, political parties of Texas – to get the word out to voters a mere 48 hours before early voting began in a state known to be one of the worst for voter turnout in the US. (During the 2010 general elections, for example, Texas had the lowest turnout of any state with only 32% of registered voters showing up at the polls.)  There were some eyes upon the news, though. Texas attorney general Greg Abbott – the Republican candidate for governor who stands to benefit most from suppression of Democratic-leaning voters and who urged the supreme court to uphold the voter ID law after Ramos’s decision – had to be watching with glee. Abbott has long been a pit bull for our state’s new white minority. He’s obsessively campaigned against voter fraud, declaring it “an epidemic” in Texas, despite the fact that his office has only ever been able to prove two cases that could have been prevented through the new law. Last week, he even encouraged voters on Twitter to use their concealed handgun licenses to identify themselves at the polls. (Nearly 88% of concealed carry permits issued in the state of Texas in 2013 went to white people.)  But it’s only recently come to light just how far Abbott is willing to use his office to suppress voter participation. In 2010 – the year the Texas Republican party lost its foothold in Abbott’s hometown of Houston – he went so far as to raid one locally-based voter-registration office called Houston Votes, under the pretense that the organization was engaged in election fraud. Armed agents descended on the Houston Votes office and confiscated computers and hard drives, putting them out of commission. But Abbott never filed any charges against Houston Votes and the Dallas Morning News reported that, in 2013, Abbott had their computer equipment destroyed.  It’s almost as if our elected officials are afraid that, should disadvantaged Texans ever became politically engaged, they would vote the GOP right out of power – and relevance. But the more that Republicans cling to discriminatory legislation as a means to thwarting their would-be successors, the more they ensure their end, by way of extinction.
Cindy Casares: Conservatives and the US supreme court like to mess with minorities. But that doesn’t mean we won’t fight for our most basic right