Ginsburg edits her voting rights dissent
on Oct 22, 2014 at 1:12 pm
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has issued a new version of her dissent, released early Saturday morning in a Texas voting rights case, to fix an error about one kind of ID card that voters can use to qualify to vote. The revised dissenting opinion, in full, can be read here.
As the majority of the Court allowed Texas to continue enforcing a strict new law requiring voter ID documents before registered voters may cast ballots, Ginsburg dissented for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, arguing that the restrictions will deny the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of Texans.
In ticking off her objections, Ginsburg wrote that Texas would not even accept “photo ID cards issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs.” On Wednesday, the Justice conceded that that comment was incorrect. That kind of ID card, she said through the Court’s public information office, is “an acceptable form of photo identification for voting in Texas.” So she simply deleted the sentence, and reissued the opinion. The Court also said that she had made “small stylistic changes” on two pages of her opinion, and that the corrected version could be read on the Court’s website.
