The Republican-dominated Texas Legislature passed the new law earlier this year, designated “emergency” legislation by Gov. Rick Perry this time around. GOP efforts had come up short in previous sessions, but this year Texas joined a handful of states enacting similar laws.

“This law is a part of the largest legislative effort to turn back the clock on voting rights in our nation in over a century,” said Advancement Project co-director Judith Browne Dianis in a statement.

The group goes on:

Black and Latino voters are approximately twice as likely to lack the requisite state ID than white voters and will experience a heavier burden in terms of costs than their white counterparts. Only 9 percent of white Texans live below the federal poverty level compared to 22 percent of African Americans and 26 percent of Latinos. Black and Latino voters in Texas earn 44 percent less than White voters.

The Advancement Project devoted particular attention in a report earlier this year to efforts by the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, and its True the Vote campaign to train poll-watchers for voting sites, often in minority areas — an effort the Texas Independent has been following.

the law in Texas has gotten p

The League of Young Voters Education Fund joined in the effort Thursday, the Houston Chronicle reported.

“In balancing the non-existent harm of in-person voter fraud against the measurable and identifiable record of actual disfranchisement of qualified voters, the coalition believes that the Department should err on the side of permitting qualified voters access to the polls,” Christina Sanders, the group’s state director, said in a statement.

The TPMMuckraker blog reported Tuesday that the DOJ is in the middle of considering a handful of states’ new voter ID laws, paying particular attention to the states’ justification for passing the law.

Read the coalition’s letter to the DOJ below:

Voter ID DOJ Comment Letter

A Pew Hispanic Center report released Tuesday indicates that a record 6.6 million Latinos voted in the November midterm elections, and that they represented a larger share of the electorate in 2010 than in any previous midterm election. #

The Pew report is framed in a way that shows Latino voters have tremendous potential clout in future elections, says Cristina Francisco-McGuire, election reform policy specialist at the Progressive States Network. She says it sets the stage for a conversation about the the election reforms needed to boost participation in the Latino community. #

Progressive State Network states aims to transform the political landscape by sparking progressive actions at the state level by supporting state legislative campaigns. #

Franciso-McGuire tells The Florida Independent that Florida House Bill 1355 is an example of efforts to suppress the participation of minority and low-income voters. The bill would not allow voters to change their name and address at the poll on election day, and forces voters who need to do that to cast their vote by provisional ballot. People who tend to take advantage of this are minority or low-income citizens who tend to be more geographically mobile. According to the Advancement Project (.pdf), in 2008, 51 percent of provisional ballots in Florida were not counted. #

The Pew report indicates that more than 50 million Hispanics were counted by the 2010 census, up from 35.3 million in 2000. In that same period, the number of Latino eligible voters increased to over 21 million. But Latino representation among the electorate remains below representation in the general population. The Latino population eligible to vote is smaller than it is among any other group, because almost a quarter of Latinos old enough to vote are not U.S. citizens. #

Fabiola Carrion, a broadband and green jobs policy specialist at Progressive States Network, says immigration-enforcement bills like Arizona’s S.B. 1070 have mobilized Latino citizens and non-citizens. #

Freddy Balsera — president of Miami based Balsera Communications, which specializes in public policy and political communication for Spanish- and English-speaking Hispanic audiences — tells the Independent that the increase in registered Hispanic voters and those who actually vote shows a growing sense of political responsibility in the community. #

Balsera says that many Hispanics think laws like Arizona’s S.B. 1070 have nothing to do with securing the borders or about the undocumented, but are reactions to the degree to which the Hispanic community and culture are being welcomed into the greater fabric of the U.S. #

He adds that more voters means that other issues important to Hispanics come to the forefront: property taxes, bank loans for business, home purchases. Balsera says growth is measured in several ways: purchasing power, academic power, electoral power, and that as the Latino community grows, the commercial and business interests of Hispanics also become more significant. #

Proponents of the legislation (typically Republicans) generally argue that voter ID is not an onerous burden but is necessary to prevent voting fraud.

“These photo ID proposals, while appearing benign on their face, are not,” said Denise Lieberman, the report author and senior attorney of Advancement Project. “They’re part of a larger and more insidious coordinated effort to push back voting rights for voters of color and other vulnerable populations, who saw increased voter turnout in 2008, in an effort that will have the effect of depressing voter turnout in 2012.”

In addition to voter ID legislation, Lieberman highlights initiatives such as King Street Patriot’s True the Vote (KSP/TTV) project to recruit 1 million poll watchers for Election Day 2012. The report cites articles from the Texas Independent on KSP/TTV, and from the Minnesota Independent on assertions by the state’s county attorneys that Minnesota Majority’s reports of massive voter fraud in 2008 were “frivolous.”

Lieberman referred to the Houston tea party’s recent national summit, which drew attendees from more than two dozen states. “This isn’t limited to Harris County, Texas — 2010 was a practice run for a similar nationwide effort in urban centers across the nation in 2012, playing on unsubstantiated fears of so-called voter fraud, which has been documented not to exist, to justify placing full-scale voter challenge and voter-intimidation efforts at polling places and precincts that have disproportionate minority populations,” she said.

The Texas House and Senate have passed differing versions of voter ID legislation, Senate Bill 14 by state Sen. Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay). The legislation is now in conference committee.

The House’s version of the bill is especially troublesome, Lieberman said because it does not contain an exemption to the requirement for people age 70 and over.

“Seniors are a particularly vulnerable population because now that exemption is gone, a lot of seniors in Texas will be significantly affected. Many of bills across the U.S. do exempt senior citizens, partly because those are the folks who have the hardest time getting original source documents,” she said.

Additionally, Lieberman said the Texas legislation’s fiscal note is not a true reckoning of how much the law would cost to implement.

Lieberman, of Missouri, said, “One of the problems with Texas is the Legislature is estimating it will cost $2 million. In Missouri, it cost $20 million to implement. We only have 4 million voters, and our law exempts senior citizens from the requirement. $2 million is a paltry sum. It doesn’t begin to account for the actual cost Texas is going to have to incur in providing free IDs.”

She said she would expect the U.S. Department of Justice to raise the same kinds of objections it presented against Georgia’s voter photo ID legislation, which she said only eventually passed Voting Rights Act preclearance once the state spent 10s of millions of dollars to give citizens notice, including via direct mail, public service announcements, public notices, television advertising and notices in everyone’s utility bills.

“If Texas is actually to do all that, do everything Georgia has done, it’s going to cost a lot more than $2 million. They have not allocated the resources to do this right,” she said. “They simply can’t on $2 million, and the bill doesn’t require them to do all of these things. I think that does make it quite suspect under the Voting Rights Act.”

Describing her group as a “civil rights action tank” based in Washington, D.C., Lieberman said Advancement Project and its attorneys are working to combat pending legislation, examining possible legal challenges to laws that are passed, and pushing for gubernatorial vetoes of bills (though not in Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry has deemed it a legislative priority).

The judge also revealed that he had voted early on Friday and had to stand in line for more than two hours. “It was quite a civics lesson,” Williams said.

The Advancement Project, which joined in the lawsuit with the NAACP, issued a statement saying, “With 500,000 new voters and high expected turnout the burden shouldn’t be on voters, it should be on the Commonwealth to make sure voting is accessible.”

“You have an unprecedented turnout in a historic election,” said Adisa Muse, director of the Virginia ACLU’s rights-restoration project, “and you just don’t have enough resources.”

On Friday, the Advancement Project, a national voter-protection organization, announced it was moving forward, in conjunction with the Virginia NAACP, in its lawsuit against Gov. Tim Kaine and top state election officials for allegedly failing to provide enough voting machines and poll workers to meet the expected turnout in minority precincts in Richmond, Norfolk and Virginia Beach.The lawsuit seeks remedies like extending voting hours to 9 p.m. on Election Day and offering the option of paper ballots if voters have been waiting longer than 45 minutes. A federal judge in Richmond will hear arguments today.

Nancy Rodrigues, Virginia’s secretary of the board of elections,  told The Washington Independent that the lawsuit’s findings are out of date — and that state law doesn’t permit paper ballots or extended voting hours. That view is disputed in the lawsuit and by other election experts, citing the board’s authority to ensure that elections are properly administered.

The Kaine administration has found an unusual ally in defending against the lawsuit: the Republican Party. State GOP officials are seeking to intervene on the side of the governor, branding the request a “ploy” to get more Democrats to vote. “The other side is exploiting every single loophole that they have available to them,” Del. Jeffrey Frederick, the state GOP chairman, complained to The Washington Post.

Kaine has irked voting-reform advocates by saying that the state is “extremely well-prepared” to handle a big turnout and that long lines are not a major worry. “Look, we wait in line to buy coffee at Starbucks,” he said. “You wait in line to get on a roller coaster,”

“We shouldn’t treat the right to vote like a latte,” countered Judith Browne-Dias, co-director of the Advancement Project. She charges that there are racial disparities in the ratios of voters to machines that could lead to long lines and voters leaving before they cast ballots. In one largely black precinct in Richmond, Advancement Project researchers found a ratio of 452 registered voters per machine, “while across town [in a predominantly white neighborhood], it was 188 voters for each machine.”

Virginia law only requires that the decentralized election boards meet a minimum standard of 750 voters per machine.

With a half-million newly registered voters and an 85 percent turnout expected in some counties Tuesday, the Advancement Project estimated that such high turnouts would require some under-resourced precincts to take 20 hours to process all voters who show up.

There are other potential snares facing voters in Virginia. Peggy Sanner, Virginia coordinator for the non-partisan Election Protection coalition, worries that some voters will be “inappropriately challenged” over their eligibility, slowing down lines. Last week, for example, voting-rights groups protested that the registrar in Radford, Va., was illegally blocking eligible college students from voting because they listed their campus addresses as their home addresses.

In addition, many newly registered Virginia voters, including college students, don’t know that they’re required to bring some form of ID to the polls if they didn’t provide an ID when they registered. The result? They’ll be forced to use a provisional ballot, which are sometimes not included in final vote tallies. In Ohio in 2004, 22 percent of provisional ballots were not counted.

Even the long lines already evident during early voting haven’t fazed state officials. Asked about the possibility of delays on Election Day due to machine shortages, Rodrigues said, “All localities are following the law.”

Research assistance for this article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.