Texas must pay $6.8 million in legal fees to parties who challenged voter ID law, federal appeals court says – By Alexa Ura (Texas Tribune) / Sept 3 2021
The case ricocheted through federal courts for nearly seven years and over several elections, with federal judges ruling that Texas lawmakers discriminated against Hispanic and Black voters when crafting one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws.
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Texas remains responsible for nearly $6.8 million in legal fees and costs owed to the collection of parties who sued over its voter ID law.
Although the state ultimately won the long-winding fight to keep the voter ID law on the books, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court ruling that found the state is on the hook for that sum — the last vestige of the legal battle over the 2011 restrictions the state set on what forms of photo identification are accepted at the polls.
The Texas attorney general’s office had appealed that lower court ruling, which found the plaintiffs in the litigation — Democratic U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, individual voters, voting and civil rights groups, the NAACP-Texas and the Texas House’s Mexican American Legislative Caucus, among others — were the “prevailing parties.”
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