Plaintiffs could go to the courts and ask that Texas be bailed under Section Three of the Voting Rights Act – which states that if a state or jurisdiction is shown to have intentionally discriminated against certain voters, the state or county must get permission from the federal government to put further election laws into effect. Essentially, it’s still legal for the Justice Department to require states to get federal approval before changing election laws, but there’s no set way to determine which states should be subjected to it. Under the legislation, each voter would need to provide one of seven types of ID — including driver’s licenses, passports, weapons permits, and special, state-provided voter ID cards — every time he or she went to the polls. Here is some of her reasoning:

At the heart of the issue is an ongoing battle between Republicans who say they hope to fight voter fraud and Democrats who say the true aim of such photo ID requirements is to create a substantial burden on the right to vote, particularly for minority voters. “Because the Fifth Circuit found that some of the evidence in this case was not probative of a discriminatory purpose in the Texas Legislature’s enactment of SB 14, this Court was tasked with re-examining its conclusion on the discriminatory purpose issue,” the opinion, written by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, said. “Many categories of acceptable photo IDs permitted by other states were omitted from the Texas bill.”

She also concluded in Monday’s ruling that the law “had a discriminatory impact” and that there had been a “pattern of conduct unexplainable on grounds other than (the) race factor.”

The Department of Justice during the Obama administration and other organizations had joined efforts to stop what they considered to be one of the strictest voting ID laws in the nation. It’s likely that it will no longer be fighting against the Department of Justice under President Trump, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a proponent of voter ID laws and has expressed skepticism toward the Voting Rights Act. The state appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court, which in July agreed with Ramos’s ruling that the voter law was unconstitutional.
A federal district court for southern Texas rules that the state's voter ID law was passed in 2011 with the intent to discriminate against minority voters. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals previously found that the law had the effect of discriminating against minority voters, and remanded the case to the district court for further action.