Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she’s not surprised Southern states have pushed ahead with tough voter ID laws since the Supreme Court freed them from strict federal oversight of their elections.
Ginsburg said Texas’ decision to implement its voter ID law hours after the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last month was powerful evidence of an ongoing need to keep states with a history of voting discrimination from making changes in the way they hold elections without advance approval from Washington.
The Justice Department said Thursday it would try to bring Texas and other places back under the advance approval requirement through a part of the law that was not challenged.
“The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn’t make any sense to me,” Ginsburg said Wednesday in her office at the court. “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen.”
The 80-year-old justice dissented from the 5-4 decision on the voting law.
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