Voting Rights

The case, Veasey v. Abbott, carries the names of U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, a Democrat from Fort Worth and the primary plaintiff in the case, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is the defendant.

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Civil rights groups -- later joined by the Justice Department -- responded with a lawsuit to block the law. The case was heard by Ramos, an appointee of President Barack Obama, and she ruled in favor of Veasey in October 2014.

In the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, a new heavily Hispanic 33rd District is drawn while the 6th remains the court-mandated coalition district. The 30th is kept majority black. All three seats are heavily Democratic, and Rep. Marc Veasey likely runs in the 6th. This would allow Hispanic voters to reliably elect their preferred candidate in the 33rd, which is not the case under the current map despite Republican claims that it would do so.

Some districts have significantly more children, felons, and immigrants who are ineligible to vote, and this gives the voters in those districts more political clout. For example, while each district holds the same population, 70 percent of citizens in Lamar Smith's San Antonio district can vote, while only 44 percent of those in Marc Veasey's Fort Worth district are eligible. This means that, in a perfect election with 100 percent turnout, a vote in Veasey's district would carry more weight than one in Lamar's district.

The 36 congressional districts in Texas each had 698,488 people in them when they were drawn. That seeming exactitude hides big differences. The 17th Congressional District, represented by Bill Flores, R-Bryan, has the same number of people in it as the 33rd, represented by Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth. But Flores' district has 532,324 adults — 62,868 more than Veasey's. That means there are more children in the Veasey district than in the Flores district.

A few months later, in October 2013, federal Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos struck down the voter ID law in a consolidated suit filed against the state by U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Texas, the NAACP, and the Mexican American Legislative Council.

The law was subsequently blocked as racially discriminatory under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2012, right until the U.S. Supreme Court declared Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional in 2013, allowing the law to go back into effect.