By: Jeff Tyler
The Eleventh Circuit recently decided a 2015 lawsuit brought against Alabama’s voter photo ID law. The suit – brought by the Alabama NAACP, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and several individual plaintiffs – challenged Alabama’s requirement that all voters must provide photo ID in order to vote. Alabama’s voter photo ID law passed in 2011 with zero support from black legislators, but did not go into effect until 2014. In its lawsuit, the NAACP claimed that the photo ID requirement, as implemented, violates the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (“VRA,” now codified at 52 U.S.C. § 10301).