 because the library will be closing so we don't want to miss the opportunity for all of you to ask questions. My name is Madhu Sridhar. I am the program vice president for the League of Human Voters of San Antonio and on behalf of the League of Human Voters of San Antonio area, I want to welcome you all for this forum which I think is a very important forum on Texas voter ID log, where it is today things are happening even today as we speak and we talk about it in our panel discussion. The purpose of this forum is twofold. One, to share the accurate and correct information regarding the IDs, voter IDs that will be accepted on election day for the upcoming election and the second purpose for this forum is to talk about the voter ID law and have a better understanding of what this law is all about, what are the changes we are talking about, what are the implications of it and what to expect in the future. So in this two hour period we hope to focus on these two issues. As far as the League of Human Voters is concerned, I just want to say that League of Human Voters is a nonpartisan political organization. We neither support or oppose any parties or any candidates. The League encourages informed participation, informed and active participation of citizens in their government. It works to increase understanding of major public policy issues and works to increase and influence public policy through education and advocacy. We are a volunteer citizens organization and we are a grassroots organization and if I may add one of the most trusted organizations in the USA. So I'm so glad that you all have joined us. The League was founded in 1920, just about the time it was actually six months prior to the 19th Amendment was passed and it was mainly founded to help 20 million women, you know, they all gained the right to vote so help them how to take care of the new responsibility. So the League since its inception has worked very hard to expand and also to give voice to all American citizens and I happen to be a naturalized, very proud naturalized American citizen and my first talk after I took the oath of my citizenship was at the town clerk's office in Andover, Massachusetts to register to vote. So if I know what voting means, I know how it impacts our lives and unless we vote, you know, things can't happen. And I'm a firm believer in what President Harry Truman said. It's not the hand that signs the law that holds the destiny of America. It is the hand that casts the ballot. It's not about the tax ID law or anything because voter ID law, I should say, in Texas because we have an expert panel and we have an absolutely fabulous moderator who was, I was told by a friend he was walking in slightly beyond election law. So we are delighted that we have gathered all these experts to talk to you and share with you. So I will let them do the talking on the issue at hand, which is the Texas voter ID law. We have organized this program in collaboration with the San Antonio Student Chapter of ACS, the American Constitution Society. So I would like to welcome here William McDaniel, who is the Vice President of the Student Chapter here and he will speak with you and he will introduce the moderator who happens to be his professor. Please welcome William McDaniel. It means a lot to us that we can have such a great turnout on a very important topic facing the state of Texas and our country today. As was mentioned, my name is William McDaniel. I am the Vice President of the American Constitution Society's Student Chapter at St. Mary's University School of Law. The American Constitution Society is a non-partisan organization that is also national and that it has a presence all across the nation and our entire goal is to try to promote dialogue and the intercourse between the issues today facing America and in particular the constitutional problems facing America. Now we come from a progressive perspective and believe that the living constitution is what dominates and is what controls in today's society. So we want to encourage that dialogue across all different groups of people here today and we are so excited to partner with the League of Women's Voters here in San Antonio to promote dialogue on this perfect constitutional issue today. And Professor Al Kauffman, who I am very pleased to announce is a leading expert in this area or at least in terms of a leading expert of minority rights in the state of Texas. Professor Kauffman is a wonderful professor at the St. Mary's University School of Law and I am happy to have him here to moderate our event and welcome him today to speak on our behalf. Thank you very much. It was an honor to be chosen to be the moderator. My main job here is to throw the ball to these wonderful speakers. San Antonio is really an epicenter of voting rights in the United States. Texas has been involved probably more litigated than the state of the country and San Antonio is the center of much of that litigation. But we also have had very great activists in this area, so we have a chance to hear from many of those today. I want to thank the Sponsor League of Women Voters in the American Constitution Society. The topic is the voter ID law, a law passed by Texas in 2011 over tremendous opposition, a very polarizing law, but one felt very important by some people and one felt very negative by others. I've been involved in much litigation since then and this panel will help you work through the present status of voter ID law and the present status of litigation. One thing I do want to point out is to avoid some confusion. The voter ID law is a Texas law. There are voter ID laws in many other states. Some of them have been upheld. Most have been struck down by courts. So we don't have the only voter ID law. Most people have argued that Texas is the most restrictive of voting rights in the United States. There's also something called the Voter Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 by the Texas in 1975. The longer in effect the Supreme Court basically took out part of their plight to Texas. But that is part of this in terms of the Voting Rights Act implementation as well as other voting rights bills. So our speakers today, and just a wonderful group as I've said, first we have Jackie Calhoun from the Elections Administrator of Barrett County. She's been a fairly busy woman for about the last 10 years. She's the Elections Administrator since 2005 and been involved in elections since 1981. Has run 650 successful elections and she's a certified elections manager. She's been a witness in most of this litigation and has received support from both sides. I recently read about her on a Maldiff and an ACLU website and I'm a Breitbart website. So she is a well known, well known, well known, business specialist. Next we have Dr. Henry Flores is a professor at St. Mary's, a long term colleague of mine. Native San Antonio, a veteran of the Vietnam War. He served as an expert witness in at least 50 of the voting rights cases. He testified in the voter ID case. He testified in the decision cases. And he is certainly considered one of the leading experts in the area of voting rights in the United States. Very lucky to have him. And to his right is Mr. Southerner Singh from ACLU, a lawyer doing civil rights work in a broad range of activities. He's graduated from UT and Fordham Law School. He worked in Alabama before he came to Texas and some of us would say that's uphill so he's down. But he's been acting all around the state on voting issues as well as other property issues. Very lucky to have his perspective. Next we have David Rout who writes for the San Antonio paper, the Austin paper, the Houston paper. And it's covered elections in great detail. I read a lot of his articles in preparation for this and he understands these issues very well. We're lucky to have someone who has a feeling for the community and how to communicate these issues with the community. So we're looking forward to hearing from him. And last we have Nina Parales. Nina has worked for them all over the 20 years. I've worked with her for many years. I would say if you have a handful of the top voting rights lawyers in the United States, Nina is certainly in that group. We are very lucky to have someone. She won a U.S. Supreme Court case on voting rights in 2003. She basically helped to restructure Congressional District 23. She's also been involved in all the major voting cases that have been put around for the last 10 years. She's also been involved in immigration. So these are our wonderful families. And we're going to ask Ms. Collivalen to speak up to 20 minutes. The others to speak up to 10 minutes. And then we'll have questions at the end. We have two men from the American Constitution Society who are going to go around and give you cards. So let's go ahead and start the discussion with Scotland. Please. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Before I start, I want everybody to either look at your watch or take your phone out. I just want you to check the time. My phone says 6.18. So as I start my talk, this is the law. That's 6.18. Okay? That had to be first. That had to be first because it seems like this is a moving target. And as Mr. Kaufman, as Professor Kaufman said, here in Bear County, we've sort of been the election capital of the world here in the last couple of years because of the special elections after special elections. So on August 2nd, we held a special election here in Bear County for the 120th. And we were the first county in Texas to be under the original easement of voter ID. So the judge had given us very set directives. And the directives were, much as they are now, with the difference being that the voter who brought an agenda or an amended piece of information had to bring us a copy of it. And then we were supposed to take that copy, and this word just might have exploded, and staple it to a provisional ballot. And that's how it was first implemented. But the voters who did not have one of the standard 7 IDs, but had one of the other, and I put some posters in the back that you're welcome to take, they had to present to the election official a copy of it. They had to bring it in, and the election official had to keep it. They had to vote provisionally. Well, number one, you can just imagine trying to have that happen. I mean, just unbelievable. But when it gets done to the very basic, my reaction was, oh my God, I have to go buy 350 staplers. I don't want to make money. And so, again, we said this just is not going to work, but we ran that first election under it, and because it was such a small turnout, no one had to sign the reasonable impediment affidavit. And so we wrote it up and said we were there. And, you know, can we please not have staple? Can we take staple out of the board? Well, that obviously was not the reason they went back to court to change it. But they came back with the second directive. And the second directive just makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. The first word that jumped out at us as we have to manage this, and we have to implement it, is it said, think it to cast a regular ballot. It had regular in it, in bold letters. In big bold letters, it said regular. That was a dance of joy for us. And I just tell you that was a dance of joy. It's the right thing to do. Take out the whole management piece of it. Take out the entire, I know I'm preaching to the choir here because you all vote, but I want you just to think a moment that if we had people coming to the polls who didn't have one of their seven and they were permitted to vote, but they had to vote that provisional ballot, we know just from an operation standpoint that ballot takes 20 minutes to cast. It's cumbersome, they're voting on paper. What would that do to the lines to impede the election? Can you imagine? I mean, we are just really thrilled and we're hoping that we get tons of people to take advantage of this. We really are. And I know, again, you all pay attention to this. You all follow this with all of your being. You know that the court was back in session. You know that they ruled yesterday. We know that we're going to redo things again. As I said, it was 6.18. The instructions seven weeks from today. And from a management standpoint, we can't print anything because we know it's going to change. The instructions that we have to do for all of our election workers, we're going to have to massage those. But the wording that came out today that just sort of sticks in the back of my mind is that it has to be pre-cleared. So the state has to come through, I say the state, the Secretary of State's office has got to come through and pre-care this material and have it re-cleared so that we can move forward. If, for instance, you would go home and look on the Secretary of State's website, we have to train our election officials. We have to train 1,500 people. We do face-to-face classes. We're going to have them come down. We're going to start next week. And we're going to have them look at their clocks and say, this is what it is today. And we'll tell you what it is when you come to pick up your supply. The Secretary of State is required by law to have an internet training session. So they provide education and I see some of my judges in here who have used it. Well, if you go to the Secretary of State's site right now, seven weeks away from a major election, in highlighted it says, coming soon. And so that's why I wanted you to look at your clocks. Now, let's get into the nitty-gritty of where we are with reasonable impediment. They have made it so easy. They have made it so easy. Obviously, since 2011, we've had Senate vote 14 voter ID. Prior to 2011, do you know here in Mary County, 60 to 65% of our voters would step to the table and hand over their driver's license. They didn't carry the voter registration card. When it came, they took it and they put it with their important legal papers at home. And that's where it stayed. So we had crossed that bridge in one respect. Then we got to the actual what you don't have one. And we still have the provisional ballot. And the provisional ballot, they get to cure it in six days. What that means is if someone steps to the polls, they do not have one of the seven very strict seven. They voted provisional. But then they were given more paperwork that said, now you have six days to go down to the elections office and show them your ID. And then we will count that vote. And your ID could not be more, work less, 60 days expired. That was the limit. No more than 60 days. So it was 61 days, grow up. Your vote would not be counted. But I'm here to tell you, since we had that here in Bear County, we have had a total of 32 ballots cast provisionally in every election since 2011. And out of those 32, we've only had three people come in to cure them. So we lost those other votes. So now we're going to move forward to the reasonable impediment. And I left some out on the table. And where we stand now is that the court added any number of, I want to say more common pieces that you can bring to the polls to prove who you are. Number one, the person must be registered. This is not just open the doors for anyone. This is a process to take care of our registered voters. That part has to be one of the number one things said. Because there's so much confusion over this. And we know people, I should say, because I thought they were great for a long time, they'll read the headline, but they won't read the story. And sometimes the headline doesn't tell the stories. And now the people getting their news on the internet and all these other, they may not see the entire story. So you see a story that says, now you can vote in Texas with a piece of mail. You can take a government piece of mail that has been delivered to you. That's what we did in the past. A government piece of mail, a post office sent it to you. It has your name and your address on it. It can be a CPS bill. It can be an Exxon bill. It can be anyone that they've spelled out here. Guess what? You can just bring your own registration card. That nice piece of paper that you put someone in your home. You can bring that. Well, you wouldn't have gotten the registration card if you hadn't registered. So we have to keep beating that problem. We have to keep. That's just one of the strongest connections we need to make happen. They also, when they looked at this and both sides agreed, just who decided that your ID, your driver's license or anything, had to have been expired more than, if it was more than 60 days, you ran a lot. Where did they come up with 60 days? It doesn't take 60 days to get a new driver's license in the mail. I don't know where that arbitrary number of 60 days came from. But the good thing is now, they've expanded it to four years. Huge jump. 60 days to four years. But four years is like the best news ever. Because some of the people who came, and we know, cast a provisional ballot because they didn't have, they had a driver's license that was expired. Some of our senior citizens, you know, you take the driver's license and privilege is away and you can't drive anymore. They hold on to their driver's license. Well, not for four years. I just think that's like one of the best things they ever did. I really did. So we're going to have to put that in our instructions. So this easing of the voter ID implementation, it's called a reasonable impediment declaration. And the way it's going to work, and I'm really, really, we're working on this guys, we're really working on this, is for this November election, huge turnout, we're trying to get ready for it. And so we're going to have an extra person in the polls. And they're going to be, we call them the reader, but they're basically going to be like a pre-checker. So they're going to work the line. And they're going to ask, you know, do you have this? Are you ready? We're ready to vote. Have you moved? That question we still have to ask everyone. Feel like you're stating the President's part. And then they're going to, if they do not have one of our seven forms of ID, they're going to ask them if, if they would like to vote under reasonable impediment. Now this is a form that will be handed to the voter. The voter fills it out on their own. And they put their name on it. And this is a declaration. They will swear to this. And it says, by signing this declaration, I swear to a firm under penalty of courage that I'm the same individual who personally appeared at the polling place. I'm casting a ballot while voting in person. And I face a reasonable impediment for difficulty that prevents me from having, from getting the acceptable form of photo ID. Now that acceptable form of ID is one of the seven from SB 14 that we've used since 2011. And so they say, I don't have one. They don't have a driver's license. They don't have a passport. They don't have my original birth certificate, so on and so forth. So this goes on to say, my reasonable impediment, first you have to state the reason. Why don't you have one? And we have some boxes that you can check. Lack of transportation, lack of an original birth certificate, work schedule, lost or stolen photo ID, disability or illness, family responsibilities, photo ID applied for but never received. And then it has a line for others. The voter themselves will check the box underneath that statement for, as they say, God and everyone to see. It says, the reasonableness of your impediment or difficulty cannot be questioned. In bold letters, it's on the form. Again, I have some forms like that, but this is the form as of 618 today. The voter raised their hand and swear that this is true. Then the bottom of the form is basically for our election officials. They're our eyes. There are agents in the field. And so they have to check a box that says, yes, I saw their voter registration card. Yes, I saw the piece of mail. Yes, I saw the CPS bill. And so they have to check what was shown to them as our agent. And then the election official signs it. And they get to go over the eye with tronics and cast a regular in bold ballot. That's like the best thing. We're trying to mitigate the time that it will take because it won't take the 20 minutes of a provisional ballot to cast it. But it will take some time. It will take some amount of time. So in our training, and again, we've come up with a free checker or a reader to handle the people that are in line so that they can fill this out by the time they got to the table. And so when they're there, it's all done. Again, cannot be questioned. So they can end again. The election official brings them up in the poll book, prints out the label. They go to the eye with tronics. The only other piece I'm not really sure of, and I said this to Nina, is number one, I have no idea how many of these to print. And you have to be psyched. I don't have a clue. But secondly, when this is over, we have to collect all of these. And they have to be sent to the Secretary of State's office within 30 days. Now, that's a piece. I mean, sometimes I get logic, and sometimes I get rules. But why, if you can't question it, are we going to send it to another agency? Sometimes I don't get this right-hand, left-hand stuff. I really don't. But, you know, that's, there it is. This is what it is right now. The voter puts their name at the top. The voter signs it right here. So I'll be able to answer questions for about time, though. Thank you very much. If you go through the other speakers, I would like them also to address the issue of what voting was like in 2011. So you describe it, obviously, the complications now, but it was a simpler time before this bill passed. So a lot of the complications were caused by a reaction to this bill. Thank you very much. Dr. Flores, in your, you know, in your studies of voter ID, by the way, you heard the book about this subject, what does the voter ID law reflect about Texas' historical relations with Latino and other minority groups, yet to summarize your book in four minutes? What and who is behind the way the voter ID law was conceived and designed, and you must do that in a nonpartisan way. That's your assignment. The answer to your second question, which is, hand this out, cut all the names and all the party affiliation and everything else, so who designed the voter ID law? And the bottom line is... No, no, wait. Don't let Margaret stay. I don't put it in the ears. Me and I work as a team. I've been her expert in a lot of the cases that she's dealt with. And I echo what I'll say. She's probably the best. I'll be back to turn to the whole United States. We're looking to have her in Texas. When I first started doing this, I was recruited by a voting rights lawyer by the name of George Torval, who brought the quite knee registered lawsuit to kind of change the whole representational structure in the state and the government and eventually kind of cascade it through all different types of municipalities and governments from school districts to local governments. It brought a single-member district representation and it was brought before the Voting Rights Act was applied to Texas. But when George recruited me in 1986 to work on my first case, he said, I want you to know a couple of things. One, Texas has single-handedly written the history of voting discrimination laws in the whole United States. Secondly, Texas has been sued by 1986. He said, and you got to take George's opinion with a little bit of green salt sometimes. He said Texas has been sued over 200 times under the Voting Rights Act. And I went around and asked different voting rights attorneys how many lawsuits have been involved in? I get numbers like 150, 160, just crazy numbers. And I went back to the Department of Justice and I started looking at how many section 5 objections. They didn't keep track of the section 2 litigation numbers. But in my book, I built a table of the states and how many objections under section 5 were brought against each state. And Texas has led the pack with 189 up to 2013. So indeed, we have led the nation. We have led the nation practically crafting voting rights law simply because it's been sued so many times from the state to the various counties, to school districts, cities, even to special government districts. Why? And that's why... that's a book I'm writing right now, actually. And I've come to this conclusion that the voter ID case that originally was brought by Nina in section 5 hearing in 2012 in the U.S. District circled, I would say, here at really pre-clearance hearing before Shelby County knocked out section 4 via the Voting Rights Act. The voter ID law that we have is really the latest iteration of racially discriminatory barriers that are part of Texan political culture. Texans is a racist politically cultural state. Racism is an important thread in the fabric of the way Texas thinks about politics. And it'll do anything to create barriers to prevent Latinos, African-Americans, Asians from participating in political processes. And the voter ID law is just the latest example of something like that. Why? And that's the question I'm trying to answer in the current book I'm writing. And where I'm at on that is this. And it's kind of... my answer kind of evolves from something I told a New York Times reporter a number of years ago when he asked me, one of the lawsuits he was in the gallery and he said at a recess, he said, what's this all about? Is it about racism? I said, no, it's not. Racism is an excuse. Racism is an excuse. What it is, is the old regime, the Anshan regime doesn't want to let go of political power. They fear what will happen if they lose control of the political apparatus of the state. And I told Nina, I guess, and a couple other people that during the trial of the last congressional redistricting lawsuit, what you're looking at is the last gasp of the old white man in the state of Texas. They just don't want to let go, so they're going to fight you to the nail. And you've heard the attorney general today, I guess it was, state, some other kind of iteration. I'm not sure what it's going to be of voter ID again this next in the coming legislature. They just don't give up. And it's just fear. I mean, it's a fear of letting go of it. It's a fear of what's going to happen in a strange sort of way. It's a fear that the culture of Texas as we know it will disappear if all these people of color come in and start taking control of the government. Their way of life is gone. Their culture is gone. Their history is gone. Institutions disappear. Suddenly everybody will be speaking Spanish, you know, and on and on and on. And so in the area of voting, they create these barriers to inhibit participation in the area of education. And voting is only one example, but you'll find racially discriminatory barriers in the world of education. Just look at the way our whole financing system is structured. Our outcome has been litigating that for decades, and they're still litigating it. In the area of public accommodations about the state, they slowly disappeared in various jurisdictions. But yet this last year we still saw a cemetery racially segregated in a small town in Texas that hid the newspapers for every one's sakes. And I bet you in some of the rulers you're going to run into some of these kinds of racial segregation phenomena. And so the way I see voter ID is just that. When I testified in there, I was the racial purpose expert, I had to find evidence that Texas had acted with racial purpose. What I discovered was something really interesting. And I write about it in my book is that what happened in the voter ID case, I'll close my presentation with this because I think I might be pretty close on time. But I found was absolutely little discussion of race in all the discussions in the public record around the passage of the voter ID law. One of the most interesting days was, and I'll never forget this day, March 23, 2011 in the Texas House. The voter ID law various members of the House all Democrats tried to amend the law 67 times. And every time their amendments were tabled. Five of those amendments were to force the state of Texas to say that the law may be in violation of the Voting Rights Act or some federal law. The motion was forced to be tabled. No use of the word race, no use of the words like Hispanic or Latino, no use of the words of discrimination. All that language had disappeared. You go back and look at the 2005 legislation when they first submitted this bill and it was to prevent illegal aliens from coming across the voting board and casting fraudulent ballots. That's not what it says now. It's to protect the security and integrity of the ballot. No words, no immigrants, no illegal, no reference to race or anything. Yet the substance of the ballot, the bill stayed the same. The bills are identical for all practical purposes. Just the objectives and the goals of the bill changed. So what I found was racial rhetoric had changed from one of being very explicit in 2005 and prior to that to complete discrimination and Thomas Carlyle's words, silence was golden. Thank you. I'm not a voting rights expert. I know less than any of these five people on the panel but I just want to clarify that. I am better looking but I'm not. Mr. Singh, you are next. You are the lawyer but they show you. In your opinion, how does this issue fit into the general pattern of deal with in terms of civil rights, legal liberties for persons in Texas? What's the status of the lawsuit now? So I want to go back in time to something you mentioned, the Shelby County case, where, prior to that case, Texas and other states that historically discriminated against minority voters had to go to DC to get approval before they made changes like voter ID law, right? That's what pre-clearance is. And then that all changed in June 2015, 2013. I mean I remember the date because that's also the date that Texas went ahead and began enforcing it's voter ID law which up till that point had been stuck in pre-clearance. They didn't wait a day before they were like, this is it, let's go. And that was a pattern that we saw throughout the country, right? There was a flood of not just voter ID laws but efforts to cut back on early voting and things like that. And I want to focus on two claims that the plaintiffs in the VC case brought the voter ID case which included several private plaintiffs and the Department of Justice. The first is this. The voter ID law disproportionately affects minority voters in Texas because of historic patterns of discrimination and inequity in wealth and education and access. Black and brown voters are just likely to have the kinds of IDs that Texas now require and it was difficult to in some cases impossible for folks to get them. The second claim was that not only was this the effect of the law but in fact it was the intent of the law that the Texas legislature passed this law for the purpose of making it harder for black and brown voters to vote. So the trial court, a drama found in 24, all the way back in 2014 that yes on both counts that it had an effect that harmed minority voters who had disproportionate degree and also that this was the intent of the law. So Texas appealed and after some procedural stuff I'm not going to get into but the fifth circuit finally the on bump all the justices the majority of all the justices of the fifth circuit said you were right on the first count that this the voter ID law does disproportionately affect minority voters which is in violation of the Voting Rights Act but we are not quite there with you that this was the intent of the law and so I'll get more to that so it sent the back down to Judge Ramos for two purposes one to come up with the temporary relief which was now a place which we talked about and then the other issue was the fifth circuit said we want you to think reconsider the evidence that you use in concluding that Texas intentionally targeted minority voters the purpose was to disenfranchise black and brown voters and I thought it was interesting because it the fifth circuit pointed out some evidence which it felt was weak that the trial court relied on and some evidence which it said was stronger so just rebalance it just an interesting side note one of the things that the fifth circuit said was that it considered weak evidence that the trial court relied on and making its finding was it said look there are 254 counties in Texas you spent a lot of time focusing on one really bad actor which was Waller County now I'm not sure if that's right to me I read that there's been tons and tons of problems not just throughout the state but also in various counties let me just highlight Waller County that's how I read the trial court opinion because it really is awful and not just on voting rights the the ACLU did a study about disproportionate arrest rates for drug offense for marijuana possession and it found that despite the fact that black and white people use marijuana at the same rate in Waller County a black person was seven to nine times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession which was among the highest in the country for counties and then of course Waller County is also where Sandra Wands lost her life so I thought it was more so focusing on the fact that look there's a lot of bad actors in Texas here's one that's particularly awful in any case there's still lots of other good evidence of the Fifth Circuit pointed out for example the fact that Texas has claimed that the purpose of this law is to protect the integrity of the ballot by preventing voter fraud and the Fifth Circuit said well look there's been almost no voter fraud cases and those that have been brought have long been about something that this law didn't do anything about which was mail mail-in ballots which some evidence that those voters who use mail-in ballots tend to be older, wider and more likely to vote Republican so that's the next big issue for the trial court to decide and there's a hearing scheduled on that I think at the end of January so that's the immediate next step for that case I want to put this in a bit of a broader framework Texas is probably not giving up I think they've been pretty clear that they're going to challenge the Fifth Circuit's finding and argue something that I think is quite pernicious Texas is going to argue that as long as a state or government can come up with a facially valid reason for a law that affects voting and some people can meet it that is not a violation of the voting rights act the Fifth Circuit soundly rejected this but it's worrying given what happened just a few years ago because remember there you had in the Shelby County case where they said look we don't need to be a nanny for Texas and Florida let's get rid of that don't worry because there won't be section 2 to make sure that there will be other aspects of the voting rights act which will guard against these problems don't worry right so we don't need this anymore and now just 3 years later those very same actors are now trying to dig in further and weaken the voting rights act even more so that's certainly troubling and this is important because the trial court's decision if it finds that there was purposeful discrimination means that there's a whole new avenue of remedies available right the pre-clearance that was lost in Shelby County it would come back in if the court can find that there was intentional discrimination here which would get Texas back under the office of the federal government and have to get clearance from somebody before they can do things like this and I think that's particularly important in a state like Texas which kind of is the future of voting in the United States right this is a shifting demographic in just a couple of years Latinos would be the majority in Texas right the population will explode and it's going to be overwhelmingly black, Latino and Asian voters fill in this role so making sure they can vote is particularly important but this is why this is important we're not even placed between two lawyers I'm sorry but you're having a very important unique perspective of trying to cover this trying to make it clear to the general public and I wonder what your observations are on community response to it and any special issues about trying to report on this in a clear way so it was mentioned earlier that a lot of people read the headlines but they don't read the entire story I'm the shmo, writes those stories I just argued that you should read the stories and headlines and a lot of stories simply don't accurately reflect what's going on in the context I want to jump right back real quick before I get into my spiel the plan discriminatory intent the hearing on January 24th in the January is going to be extremely important for the future of this law aside from the potential to bail Texas back into a pre-clearance regime if a judge finds that the law the lawmakers have discriminatory purpose in crafting the law it goes by automatically the law gets shot down is invalid the next play we'll then see if the judge actually bails Texas back into pre-clearance not a guarantee North Carolina's law was whacked around by a federal court out there and they could not bail that state back into pre-clearance so that is something to still be seen if you go back and read the Fifth Circuit's opinion from July 20th you will see that discriminatory purpose is not a slam dunk by any any means there was a lot of dissent on the Fifth Circuit even bouncing that issue back to Reynolds and that threshold and it's an important play moving forward and it's going to dovetail exactly what the legislature potentially does next session as well Lieutenant Governor was on TV earlier this week I believe saying that the legislature is going to address this issue if they're going to try to tackle this in a way that's going to be full proof or at least potentially full proof in the courts they're going to need to come back to the purpose issue and some other things I mentioned earlier as well when people around the country have voter ID I want to specify that Texas's voter ID falls into a category of maybe a handful of states that do what's called strict voter ID so when you see politicians go on television and say most states have voter ID people around the country approve a voter ID understand that they're not providing context that the law in Texas is much much much stricter than the majority of those laws all around the country it's going to take me to some extent sort of what the community reaction is and I think we know what the basic reaction is it's why we're here there's so much confusion that you have groups that are going to be setting up voter hotlines to answer questions there's a liberal group in Austin today that announced setting up a website to sort of counter the state's official voting website and the group is doing this because of what it's calling this sort of misleading information that the state has been putting out through its voter education materials so you see a counter effort to what's going on right now with the state's education efforts because there are folks who don't believe the state is genuinely educating people on what they can actually do or how easy it is to cast a vote and mentioned earlier there was a court order just signed today that's going to require the state of Texas to go back and change press releases, change language on its websites and to basically require the state to keep language in accordance with the actual order that is putting out to the public it's a pretty stinging rebuke to the state's two and a half million voter education effort that rolled out all of three weeks ago maybe so my role here as a reporter is complicated by the fact that we have pending litigation we have what I believe is going to be a pending push at the legislature to address some of the discrepancies the court has found and to get a new law working that still meets the whatever the goal is of the majority party that put it in place and so my difficulty here is there's no single umbrella we have the Texas Secretary of State's office that's in charge of rolling out this two and a half million dollar education plan we have the Attorney General's office that is defending the law and the court we have the Department of Public Safety DPS that's in charge of the electronic identification cards and mobile units we have the lieutenant governor the house speaker and the governor who when convenient will posture on TV fundraising newsletter but maybe when you need to ask some details about what's going to be happening moving forward have zero details on that situation you then have lawyers you have the Department of Justice and you have a variety of groups that are suing the state as well so what that means is I felt and most importantly right here at the end of the table you have 254 different election administrators all around the state that are going to have to put these changes into effect so in any given day I'm chasing a story that has to do with four or five of these different components and I'm needing to sort of track all this information down from people who don't want to speak at all like the Attorney General's office that doesn't make me want to elaborate on what's in the briefings you have folks who want to just inundate you with information some of the plaintiffs in the case and so you go back and forth on what's the best way to acquire the information and then multilaterally disseminate it back to the public in a way that's easy enough for you guys to read three paragraphs and say okay if I don't have one of those seven things one of those seven identifications I can bring my utility bill in I can sign that for and I'm good to go casting a regular ballot not a provisional ballot key key key key thing going back to the idea that Texas had to strip this voter ID law in the country that is no longer the case under this remedial order under this order Texas' voter ID law substantially softened so all the pride that Republicans had in sort of saying that they had this voter ID law that is strict strict strict goes right out the window because now it is substantially easier to casting regular not a provisional but a regular regular ballot let me give you guys some examples of situations where some of this messaging from state leaders or where it makes my job more difficult it was mentioned earlier that the state is likely going to appeal to the Supreme Court the Attorney General today in a statement that he gave us in response to the court order and said that we'd be filing that appeal to the Supreme Court this week they postured more than a month ago in saying they were going to file that appeal and then just went silent the Attorney General's office decided to make this announcement the same day or the day after North Carolina decided he was going to appeal its much weaker law so there was some posture from a political perspective for the Attorney General to come out and sound tough we're going to fight the Fifth Circuit's decision nothing's happened in the last 40 days we're expecting that appeal sometime this week now when the Attorney General first messaged that he was going to be filing an appeal the immediate question from me and other people in the press corps was are you appealing the order the remedial order you just agreed to for November or are you appealing the merits of the Fifth Circuit's decision that says you violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act the Attorney General's office at that point in time would not elaborate or do anything to clarify and that's a key, key element because the election officials around the state need to know what the heck they're doing so for several days if not longer you had election officials all across the state that were unsure whether or not the Attorney General was going to sue to take out the order they just agreed to or whether or not they were going to sue on the merits of the bigger cause so you dismiss the Texas press continually on this conveniently enough when Fox News puts you on national television though it becomes time for the podium and the platform to say we're going to make the appeal and this is what the appeal is going to say a couple weeks ago we also went to the Lieutenant Governor's office and we said hey Lieutenant Governor what is it going to happen next session with voter ID there's no interim committees nobody's talking about it, it's a complex issue we can't imagine a legislature just going to dive into without any planning absolute silence the opportunity to go on national television arises and the Lieutenant Governor shows up and says we're going to be passing the bill next session which is in his interest to say that because the federal court has said it will not wait for the legislature session to end which is why it has set up a hearing for January you now have to in some extent a potential de facto foot race between the court to have a hearing and to issue an opinion on discriminatory purpose and the legislature to possibly pass a new law that maybe tightens up some of this stuff in there so from a reporter's perspective it becomes difficult in some situations to really get a hold of the news earlier this week there was a hearing in Corpus Christi on allegations that the state was misleading voters with its education material on allegations that state officials like the Attorney General and the election chief in Harris County were intimidating voters by going on interviews with the press and telling them we could potentially investigate people who used the affidavit to see if they're perjuring themselves because they actually have IDs that hearing was conducted in Corpus Christi three hours away at a telephone conference so you can go sit in the courtroom and hear lawyers bicker with each other over the telephone but you really couldn't see it happen in person or do any of that in my dreams this is an extremely important process it wasn't shut off but it was all happening over telephones so yesterday I got a phone call right after the hearing it's one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs and he wants to go all out about how the judge had basically spanked Texas in this hearing the only problem is you can't move on a story like that because you're not president of the hearing you don't know what the judge said the judge hasn't actually issued an order and came out today and so you're left sort of just holding and waiting to tell people what happened in the telephone conference here and because it happened three hours away and it's not really worth your time to go driving this and the lawyer to bicker on the phone so the situation can become difficult and sort of adding to this mentioned earlier it's a movement target things are moving and happening every day so one of my main jobs to keep up with this is to just simply bird-dog the docket because at the end of the day when the attorney general's office isn't responding or when lawyers aren't picking up the phone you know I have the fortune of going through and just reading the court documents and seeing what one side is saying, what the other side is saying and then ultimately what the court is saying and putting the hammer down on one way or the other on the issue I think moving forward you know watching what the court does on January 24th and ultimately watching what the legislature does as well is going to be key to this there there's one voter ID law out there I think Indiana it's already survived Supreme Court's scrutiny and if the legislature potentially wants to go and grab elements from the Indiana law and stick them into the Texas law it may be a basis moving forward or something that they think will survive will survive Supreme Court's scrutiny and I'll leave my sort of long spiel at that for right now thank you so Nina I guess we have a few questions for you we've heard about the Voting Rights Act Supreme Court through the decision of 2013 and validating part of the Voting Rights Act how does that affect what's going on here voter ID you represented two young Texans in the case who were part of the case in 2012 and have a very important interest in voting and the directly affected voter ID after you explained that to us and then also there are a lot of people very concerned about voting and I wanted to know how you might respond to them in terms of voter ID whether that is a problem here I may not be able to cover all that in the next 10 minutes so what I'm going to try to do is contextualize this voter ID litigation within the March for Progress that we've had in Texas in terms of voting rights cases and then talk a little bit about voter ID and then maybe give you some insight into essentially be going because voter ID is not the worst thing that can actually be done to voters in Texas and elsewhere so I'll give you a little insight into those horrible possibilities as well so Texas and minority voters have been in a kind of dance for lack of a better word over time minority voters trying to advance trying to register and cast ballots for Texas pushing back and then a movement forward with a voting rights case and then pushing back so I'm going to describe this for you because this pattern of movement forward and pushing back is what largely led to Texas being brought under federal supervision for its voting practices in the 1970s so let me back up a little bit and I'm going to move quickly through these years but I want you to get a sense of the flavor of what this back and forth has been like over the past century in the 1900s yes, African Americans, Latinos and others had the technical right to register and vote but we know that there were many measures brought to bear to effectively deny that right so let's talk about the white primary this is during a time when Texas is essentially a one party state it's a democratic party state the really dispositive election is the primary that's where the choice is occurring and so Texas passes a law in 1923 barring African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary the white primaries were also applied to Mexican Americans but the famous voting rights case is brought by an African American doctor in a fossil Texas and he brings this case all the way to the US Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court says you cannot have a law that prevents people of color from voting in the primary however, that same year that Texas then loses this ability Texas authorizes political parties to decide for themselves who can vote in primary elections lo and behold the Democratic party decided that only white people can vote in the Democratic primary those rules were struck down respectively in 1932 again by the same plaintiff who at this point besides his medical practice is stuck going on these cases over and over again and then finally Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal defense fund get involved and strike down another one of these laws in 1944 what happens next Democratic associations known as J. Byrd associations begin to adopt again very restrictive rules about who can vote in the Democratic primary that is also litigated finally struck down in 1953 so we're thinking okay now everybody can vote in the primary but don't forget about the poll tax which was even more effective at preventing people from being able to vote one of the historians that I use in litigation here in Texas showed that in the early times the poll tax in Austin allowed only 3% of Mexican Americans to participate in elections because if you were choosing between paying that poll tax or feeding your children or buying shoes for your children's feet you were going to go with the more practical alternative and you were not going to be able to pay the poll tax one of my favorite stories in Texas history is Lulac I know I have a friend here from Lulac, Mr. Martinez Lulac used to do essentially beauty contests but the young lady who would win the beauty contest back in the 40s and the 50s was the young lady who raised the most money to pay for people's poll taxes which I think is a great kind of beauty contest it's the beauty of the soul and so there were efforts definitely self health efforts but the poll tax was an enormous problem in Texas in terms of minority voting I really hope that's not me oh no you're scared so what happens the Supreme Court strikes down the poll tax 1966 50 years ago this year apparently we don't have the poll tax anymore the first bill in the first called emergency session in the Texas legislature was an annual voter registration requirement because God forbid we should have people willy-nilly registering to vote this is control so an annual re-registration can you imagine what an awful project that would be to try to get the whole voter roll to re-register every year right? this persists until 1971 can you believe it and so finally in the mid somewhere in the mid 1970s Texas decides to purge its entire voter roll really like the walk of every voter suppression tactic Texas wants to purge its whole voter roll and make everybody start all over again but by this time what has happened Texas has been brought under federal supervision for its voting practices what did that mean? it meant that if Texas wanted to change something about the way it ran elections it was going to have to get permission from Washington DC is it invasive? was it deserved? yes because I don't think any reasonable person can look at this long saga of practices and conclude that Texas could be trusted to somehow do things in a way that was open and welcoming to minority voters so during a period of time from the 1970s until about 2013 we had a lot of help here in Texas the Justice Department so for example in redistricting the Justice Department using that pre-clearance tool blocked one or more state redistricting plans in every single decade 1970s a redistricting plan, a house plan was blocked for being discriminatory against Latinos 1980s the plan was blocked for being discriminatory against Latinos 1990s the plan was blocked for being discriminatory against Latinos 2001 the plan was blocked for being discriminatory against Latinos now those of you who are students of politics are noting to yourself these are both Republican and Democratic administrations that were evaluating these redistricting plans and concluding that they were discriminatory against Latino voters and sometimes also African American voters but the one consistent piece here is that every single decade Texas somehow threw an amazing lack of institutional memory do you think that's over and over and over again and you know we're really we're at a point in 2006 by the time I got to the Supreme Court on a redistricting challenge of the Texas Congressional Plan a case that a lot of people were not sure if we were going to be able to win not only did we convince the court that Texas had discriminated against Latinos but the court went out of its way to know the long history of discrimination against minority voters in Texas and to say that what had been done in 2003 which takes us until 2006 to get to the Supreme Court but what had been done in 2003 smacked of intentional discrimination against Latinos and honestly to get Justice Kennedy is quite a lift because he is the sort of person who wants to live in a world that is fair on the basis of race that's the kind of history that we had in Texas leading up to the pre-clearance requirement on Texas and leading up to the adoption of voter ID so you can see that for a lot of us observing the adoption of voter ID and how tight and strict it was that it was going to have on the young on the old on minorities on the poor it seemed very much part of that long march Texas already had a voter ID law that was working pretty well before this new law was adopted that was much tighter but largely the rhetoric around the voter ID law was immigration control so we have quite a bit in the record of elected officials saying we need voter ID to stop undocumented immigrants from voting not to prevent impersonation from which is what was argued in court but that this idea that people were crossing the river, marching three days all sweaty through the desert to report to Ms. Hal Allen's office and sign up to vote and then participate in some kind of conspiracy to alter the outcome of elections right that was the kind of zanyness that we were dealing with in 2011 when the law passed we were able to block it under the pre-clerence regime but then when the supreme court took that piece of the voting rights away from us that's when voter ID moved forward were groups and the justice department able to ultimately block it hundreds of thousands of dollars and three years later one of the observations we can make about the difference between the efficiency of pre-clerence and having to slog these issues through in the federal courts we have some excellent questions already written so I'm going to try to go through these continue to write them and we have two law students here going to pick those up let me start with Ms. Hal Allen now I have two of your questions for you one, how many people do you expect to fill out the impediment point in Fair County and the general legislature I feel like I've talked about crystal ball it's still pretty loud the state of Texas when they started and in the lawsuit they identified 600,000 people that was the number they came up with that said they did not have the ID and I think the last one I saw maybe it was 608 that they moved it up to and so I don't know I mean we obviously are going to compare on the side of having more there than this one more question for you on the reasonable impediment questionnaire it says it cannot be questioned does that mean the forms are kept confidential or you said there were sent to the Secretary of State's office to maintain their confidentiality again anything that occurs in an election is open record so with the way the reasonable impediment declaration is right now we are not to make a list or anything we are just to accumulate the forms and send them to the Secretary of State's office so you know we I think again we will scan them in and send them up to them instead of sending them the hard copy so that we'll have them but all of that is open record now we'll some more questions for you will Barrett County allow for visual balance this election or not? absolutely okay Ms. Paranas you didn't get a chance to describe it to women who are part of your case can you give us a brief explanation of that please yes thank you so much no talk of voter idea at least from all that would be complete without talking about the participation of these two wonderfully young women who were our clients in the original voter idea litigation in 2012 Victoria Nicole Rodriguez were seniors at Brooks Academy of Science I don't know if you've heard about that on the south side here in town absolutely stellar students both at the time that we began to represent them were applying to college both ended up going on scholarship to St. Mary's University where we had a shout out to ACS they were absolutely fantastic young women they lived at home they had a wonderful family and yes they were Mexican American and yes they were low income and yes they were registered to vote and yes they did not have driver's licenses and when I asked mom because of course I had to have mom even though the girls were over 18 I had to have mom in a discussion I said why don't the girls have driver's licenses and she said we cannot afford to put the girls on the insurance and how many people have heard that I'm sorry so there they were young cessing women very eager to exercise they are right to vote they were qualified in every respect and they were registered they had their voter registration cards but they didn't have voter ID they didn't have passports they didn't have driver's licenses they specifically chose not to include student ID's they were never going to be able to use a student ID and they didn't have a concealed carry right and because they were native born they didn't have naturalization papers and that was it and they had trouble with transportation they always relied on other folks to give them rides but because mom was a full time caretaker of grandma and because dad worked very long hours and because DPS is not open at extremely convenient times like on the weekend they were not able to get one of these election identification certificates they had what we would call today a reasonable impediment and if they were in that situation they would be able to go to one of the places in Jair County and show that yes I don't have one of these things but I have a reasonable impediment and they would be allowed to vote they also could have voted under Texas's old voter ID system as well the one that we had before 2011 using their voter registration certificate so that was their situation and they both have ID today which is also something that we can expect that people may at different times of their lives have ID okay Dr. Flores what factors have largely discouraged voters in Texas from voting in elections and the second one is besides this law what else can be done to encourage and improve voting in Texas well besides the institutional barriers like the poll tax that was around for a long long time and the inability of some folks to not deal with Regas sisters I stay in contact with them they go to St. Mary's once graduating this May they're both honors students and the other one is a president ambassador she represents a president's office in social events and she's graduating the following year because she's an engineering major so that takes an extra year to go to they're both going to go on to graduate school so they're doing very very well but poll tax the different kinds of problems with voter ID sometimes there's just fear of the unknown a lot of Latinos that are not too well educated aren't sure exactly what kind of questions they're going to a poll polling place and so that keeps them away from the polls they just won't do it sometimes there's a lack of education one of my gripes against the state's educational system is that we don't civically educate our students they don't get government classes they don't get citizenship classes they don't get voting classes they don't learn how to be responsible for being citizens in our society and so by the time they graduate from high school they're pretty uneducated about the election system and the political system of the country and they get to social things and eventually they get their attention it's diverted from the political arena they never start voting and they don't develop a habit of voting sometimes they come from families that are also uneducated by the voting process so they don't vote so there's a whole series of different things involved how we can increase intake well for one we can reform the education system and do those sorts of things that we need to do I think that would be a major step forward Thank you very much Mr. Zink, I have two for you can you address how perjury could be pursued against someone who files the affidavits is there any chance they could file a perjury case and what would be the issue there and what effects might that have on other voting so I'm from Houston which is in Harris County where Stan Stannard is the county clerk and apparently he is going to spend all of his very limited election resources on going through each and every Resolute Amendment affidavit looking for people who were blind so the so I'm not sure about how much would actually occur there was one thing that did strike me there is this organization called Judicial Watch through the boat there is another organization called the ACRU the American Civil Rights Union I believe is what it's called they're all basically the same thing and they have been for the past couple of years pursuing lawsuits against against counties or keeping its voter rolls out of date according to it and requiring that it heard its voter rolls in order to comply with a federal election guide so given the fact that these affidavits are public records it seems like something that they would gladly step in and pursue and then notify the Secretary of State or some like prosecutors so that's something to worry about or to look for going forward Thank you very much Mr. Rao so you mentioned a website in Austin that provides alternative voter ID information and you tell us what that is and then to add to this question what effect do you think that will have on persons understanding the voting process if you have dueling websites well I understand that one of the websites right now the state's website hasn't found by federal court to be disseminating some information that does not conform with the order I'll part that carefully so that's just something to sort of keep in mind of let me look real quick here because we had this press release go out today and for anyone who's interested it's govotexas.org and again it's set up by a liberal group called Progress Texas and the idea here is it's supposed to be a one stop website to tell you about voter registration locations and FAQs on voter ID but if there are dueling websites I'd argue you use your best judgment as an adult and decide which one provides your information about it that would be my thought on that right now I don't think there's an idea that more information out here can hurt people I don't think so people need to go out there and then take what they think is, yeah, take it at face value for the most part let me ask you one more question what information do you need to know about this process still and as the election comes up what would be helpful to you in covering the story to hear from the women voters of the very constitutional society who are these lawyers and experts on the panel so I think the takeaway is it's substantially easier to cast a ballot if you don't have one of those seven identifications don't go through the circus of doing a provisional ballot and having to return to cure the ballot you simply show up with one of the long list of alternative IDs that the court has put forward a utility bill, a page that government document of some sort you show up, you tell one of the greeters or election workers at your polling location you don't have that ID and then you fill out the impediment form and you go on your way so I think the biggest thing to message people on the websites, the court orders two and a half million dollars TV ads and radio ads is if you are lacking one of seven IDs you can take an alternative ID a list of IDs that has been expanded greatly and you can cast a regular ballot with that by signing an affidavit really that's it Nina, is there any this is an easy one is there any possibility we will ever see automatic voter registration at birth that would be a problem that would be a problem now speaking of competing material for the first 30 people who sit here in the front of the slides more competing material and this has been vetted very carefully in Malta and doesn't suffer from the problems that Judge Monson almost said the state's materials suffer from so hopefully you can rely on that automatic voter registration different states are experimenting with it different states are doing different things right now one thing that's very important from Maldives perspective is that you can't just for example register everybody to vote who has a social security number because non-citizens who are here working as legal permanent residents and other work authorized individuals have social security numbers and the last thing you want to do is register somebody who's not a U.S. citizen to vote the consequences for that are so severe there are criminal penalties you can get removed from the United States and never be allowed to come back in so one of the things that we want to do in terms of automatic voter registration is balance our interest in capturing the largest number of people with our interest in making sure that only those who are eligible are registered and so it's going to require some sophistication not just some kind of gigantic vacuum sucking people up for example off the motor vehicles list or off the social security because that's going to pull in people who need to be able to say no I'm not eligible to register to vote so good idea and concept but if we're going to execute it very carefully and very well let me ask you a question about myself what happened to the motor voter bill the motor voter bill is alive and well national voter registration act is what allows you to do two things that in many states we couldn't do before one is registered to vote in the motor vehicles office parade for that as long as they forwarded to the correct county we're all set and then number two is we can register to vote by mail can you believe that 26 states did not have mail voter registration prior to the passage of the federal motor voter act when I turned 18 I had to go register to vote I had to go register to vote in person at my county seat because it was before the passage of the national voter registration act so alive and well that's what gets you registered at the motor vehicles or at any public assistance office you should be offered voter registration and all those wonderful little postcards that you see at libraries and other places that are often like different cute little colors those are also the result of the national voter registration act so we're ready for that and it is alive and well good thank you Ms. Gallagher what is the major confusion now around the states messaging on this issue and I was going to ask questions in a slightly different way what would be most helpful to you to get now from the state secretary of state's office to facilitate your process thank you some clear direction would be the first start reasonable impediment declaration my understanding is that was the part that the secretary of state's office did not promote you know it was like we've added additional forms that you can use but that they were not pushing reasonable impediment that there was a vehicle to cure this to move forward we'll see some new information and again selfishly as the implementer of this we would like to sue them rather than later obviously the law requires us to have these posters in English and Spanish in every Coleslite hosted in much larger than these which takes time to have printed training materials again same thing so for tomorrow's standpoint number one we would just really beat the drum for register to vote by October 11 register take that first step everything else await us make sure you're on those rolls October 11 and then we can go forward and phase the document Dr. Clozer you wrote with San Antonio and you've worked with Latino voting issues for a long time how do you think this message should be aimed at the Latino especially the low income Latino community in San Antonio to the most effective you want which message? the message about what you have to take what are the goals trying to encourage people to vote I think probably as many community organizations as possible should get involved and border out and reach and there should be a lot of PSAs in Spanish all the Spanish language channels all the Spanish radio channels and you know I know an organization like Hobson they don't get involved in these things but there's a lot of other community organizations that can and they can canvas neighborhoods and so forth but a lot of it has to be in Spanish it's got to be very clear like I said one of the biggest impediments is the sphere of what's going to happen at the polling place and you don't have to be undocumented because I get nervous going into the polling place I get nervous due to the authorities simply because I've been harassed by police in my life as an academic as a graduate student and before that just because I was a Mexican animal Mexican and so when I go to the polling place I've got my US passport and my voter registration card I can use them sometimes but some of those people haven't seen the passport so I the language outreach and very proactive actions by various community organizations from the west and south side from the east side can I add to this real quick? the initial question was sort of how do you target this education message keep in mind that it's not as if Texas sort of just said really nearly we're going to do this massive education effort the court ordered a robust education effort the state then said okay we have $2.5 million in the till we'll use that so the idea that the judge came up with $2.5 million is not accurate Texas had that money left over to spend on voter education more than half of that money is going to be spent on TV and radio ads the state won't say where those ads are going the state has a contract with the public relations giant that public relations giant has mapped out a map where you put those ads the state has asked the court to seal those documents those documents are sealed when I go to the state of Texas and I say how are you spending public money on television ads and radio ads which will be the bulk of your education effort they say it's all part of the strategy with the public relations firm we really can't talk to you until that money is spent mind you you pay for television ads after they run you reserve time you pay for them afterwards so the message I've gotten back from the state is maybe we'll let you know after we've paid for the ads after the election we don't know yet if the state is actually going to tell us how they're spending $1.3 million or more on television and radio ads that is going to be the bulk forget posters or websites most messaging in the campaigns happens on television and radio the other thing is the state is disseminating digital tool kits that's what they call them they're these education presentations 1800 community groups across the state are set to receive these digital tool kits it's going to cost the state about 250 grand to do that the state will also not say who these 1800 community groups are could be the legal women's voters could be Joe Blow and whatever it is that is also under seal in federal court at the discretion of the state the plaintiffs in the voter ID case did not contest that for what it's worth the public has left really hands out saying where are you going to be educating voters with television ads and what groups are going to be disseminating your information we do not know and we do not know if the state is going to tell us before the election I learned from your story by the way the consulting firm has worked with political leaders in Texas in the past can you clarify that? so the consulting firm is called Bursin Marsteller it's an international public relations giant they deal with everything from Chipotle to Russia Russia is trying to spin a scandal they hire these people and really really good at their job they have an Austin office the Austin office is run by a former top staffer in the capital and who now also provides guidance and consultation to the Texas House Speaker so Texas House Speaker Joe Strauss pays this public relations firm Bursin Marsteller for political consulting so every time I write a story about Bursin Marsteller and the contract that the state of Texas awarded them for voter education everybody wants to know if it was a competitive big contract which the state tells me it was and the state wants to know if this particular Bursin Marsteller executive the highest level of the state government includes the contract I don't have any evidence to show that but I get those questions every time I mention that firm in a story I want to clarify one or two things and then we'll just open it up because I sort of run out of good questions here so I just want to clarify one or two things for you all let's remember that the lawsuit they're talking about now is not the Voting Rights Act lawsuit that was won the Department of Justice of held interjections of the voter ID bill and that was upheld by the court in Washington so that state lost that battle then when the Voting Rights Act disappeared this lawsuit was filed in Chris before Judge Ramos Judge Ramos and she found as a district court federal district court judge can do this law was unconstitutional violated the Voting Rights Act for two reasons it was the effect and the intent of discrimination then the Fifth Circuit heard that and upheld it then the Fifth Circuit then they appealed the state appealed the state could have accepted that and done all this stuff right then and that was about a year ago far before the election but instead it was appealed the Court of Appeals didn't move on very quickly all 15 of the judges to hear it then they went to the U.S. Supreme Court the U.S. Supreme Court told the Court of Appeals they didn't tell them they had to hear it they just said if you don't decide it by July 20th we will issue other orders which sort of is like when you tell your kids if you don't go to sleep at 10 you're gonna get disbanked so on that day the Good Circuit came in with their decision which was a 9-6 decision finding the voter ID bill illegal and they sent it to the district court judge to implement it because they realized they were short on time then these settlements occurred and there's still arguments about the settlements but again if the state and the plaintiffs had agreed the next day and come up with something you both agree with Ms. Kyle Allen would you don't mind my saying this would have less gray hair and the only thing to add to all that which is an extremely confusing wheel of litigation is that the Corpus Christi judge in 2014 passed the bill and the poll tax now there was a poll tax finding that the legislature was able to remedy in the session by basically passing a bill that said you can get a birth certificate for free so the legislature passed the bill that was found to be a poll tax in 2014 the session that was going on in progress saw that ruling passed the bill and the poll tax finding now was off the table because you can get a free birth certificate which is one of the requirements because this law was found to be a poll tax at one point in time the legislature remedied that at some point I'm going to let you all make your closing statements I'll start for all of us this time you're open so give you all about three minutes each and then we'll have final comments I'm drawing a total blank I said everything I wanted to say I passed the only thing is that the legislature convenes in January watch what happens there you have a section 2 deficiency that's been identified by the 5th Circuit either the court's going to address that permanently or the legislature's going to address that permanently I don't think the Republican leaders who control the state want to leave them in the hands of a judge to dictate what the law's going to be like moving forward on a permanent basis because the remedy we have now is temporary until they get a permanent one what date did the legislature go into session? I actually don't know the date that opened and I showed it's the second week of January they end in May but it's going to be a foot race to some extent between Republican leaders to fix the law on their own or the court to come up with remedies you said a section 2 case can you explain what you mean by section 2 case? well merely that what Judge Gonzales Ramos found was that voter ID had a greater impact on minority voters than it had on Anglo voters minority voters we're not talking about huge numbers of people you may or may not know somebody who lacks voter ID but it's still a meaningful number of people whether it's 600,000 or something less than that what the court found is that among that group of people who lack ID African Americans and Latinos are overrepresented this law has what we call a disparate effect on minority voters and because of that it violates a portion of the voting rights act otherwise nicknames section 2 Mr. Sain come I guess we'll just do a vlog a little bit so the we're borrowing a model of something that the ASO Ohio did a couple of weeks ago where instead of just relying on pamphlets or already or even borrowing from a political campaign strategy getting more direct contact with those so what they did was they I guess broke up on something like a ton of people in Ohio which had some voting problems as you know and there was someone famous on the other like I think a DJ or something someone with a recognizable voice saying learn about some voting rights issues in the upcoming election so stay on the line and then he stayed around moderated the discussion and just simple questions were asked anyway they got about 10,000 people I think and so we will be replicating that targeting about 30,000 numbers in the Rio Grande Valley so and I think you can comment also if you're interested please go to our website that probably in the next week or so my book just came out in paperback it's received excellent reviews I don't know no my closing comment has to do with something that just perplexes me and I don't understand who put a deer brain to let it perplex you too I'm not sure there's an answer to this unless you can get one of these guys on a couch and psychoanalyze them but I know the state senators intent in writing the border ID law I can't use it because the source that I have is confidential but they did act with racial intent and what's interesting to me is they also know that they act and do things illegally in the way they would district and so forth every decade it's the same story over and over they know they're violating the law they know they're racially discriminating and to me it raises questions in my mind if they know they're doing something illegal why do they continue doing it and don't they really care about the rights of other people what does it say about what kind of people are those that are writing out a law okay Ms. Tell-Ellen this has been a wonderful evening I've learned so much as I usually do when I come out to these I like it when I say we're going to have a plug so please we're still looking for election officials I will we will be volunteer and I want to go back to beating that drum of October 11 before the filing deadline to register to vote to register to vote and just sort of digressing a little bit as I left the office today we now have one million twenty two thousand and sixty four people registered in your county last presidential election we had nine hundred and thirty thousand people we had one million twenty two thousand sixty seven people hopefully we'll all be registered that's it and I know a lot of your voter registrars for us and for that we thank you very much thank you all very much and I think we have one question yes thanks Mr. Robinson one question will this be in the first presidential election without the protection of the voter the voter protection act because it's not going to be new what are some of the main concerns and red flags that you would like to tell us about yes this is going to be the first presidential election since 1965 depending on which part of the country you were living in in Texas since 1975 that we do not have the clearance protections of the voting rights act what that means is if a state or a county or a town changes to its election laws and that changes discriminatory we can either litigate it and get rid of it before the election or maybe if it's put into place very close in time to the election the election will be held under that new rule that some people believe is discriminatory so we've called out for those who are very civically engaged all around to look at whether there's going to be sudden movement of polling places which I know is not going to happen here but there are sometimes jurisdictions that play a little bit of games with locations of polling places hours of voting periods of early voting time for registration all of those things and so it requires quite a bit of vigilance and talking out about it thank you thank you and as you tell me I have learned so much tonight I with NAACP we are working with the coalition about 30 some different organizations to include churches that make a numerous of different churches but I could never duplicate the information that I just heard and I'm looking in this room the people who need to have that information they're not in this room perhaps I think the people who are sitting here are people who have bits and pieces of what you've heard tonight and you've expanded that is it reasonable to ask if we can duplicate this perhaps to the community form with and like I said we have the minority from the Greek organization 100 Black Rain All the Capital who are part of our coalition and I would love for them to hear what I've heard tonight so that we can get that assembly that message out to the broader community two quick responses one now cast is filming this and will be online so if you'll get their their sheet you can get their on-site their website you can put the link to your website and then put that there this is on YouTube now okay it's already on YouTube it's already on YouTube now cast secondly because I'm sure many of the speakers here it's invited by you might well go and speak to your group I can't convince them I'm just saying you've got them all here and you're between them and the door that's always very important thank you all very much I appreciate it for the link if you are interested in buying tickets for the luncheon they are being sold outside at the curable you can look for Nancy Price right? yeah and thank you Ray for coming and joining I'm sure they are good luck