In yet another ruling on the state’s persistent effort to impose unnecessary restrictions on the franchise, Ramos on Wednesday rejected Texas’s latest attempt to enforce a voter ID law plainly designed to selectively discourage non-white Texans from voting. Moreover, she declined to craft for the state a legal voter ID scheme, instead telling the legislature to try again from scratch if it really wants some kind of voter ID system. Eliminating the law “ ‘root and branch’ is required,” she wrote, “as the law has no legitimacy.”

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No legitimacy.

A crucial piece of Ramos’s rationale is not unique to Texas. This cannot be repeated enough: It is unnecessary past the point of irrational to hassle people for ID at polling places.

There is a striking “lack of evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud,” Ramos noted. Though she asked for solid information on such malfeasance, the state supplied her little. Rather, it offered material that “is replete with accounts of allegations and investigations, but not of any findings or convictions for in-person voter impersonation fraud.” This sounds much like how President Trump justifies one of his favorite fantasies — that massive voter fraud lost him the 2016 popular vote. The president has even launched an investigation of his own, the existence of which will self-justifyingly become more “evidence” of a crisis.

Further, Ramos wrote, in the decade before the Texas legislature passed its voter ID law, “there were only two votes cast that resulted in fraud convictions.” That is out of 20 million votes counted. Since the law was passed, she noted, “the rate of referrals, investigations, and convictions (detection and deterrence) did not increase.”

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These facts reflect the national picture. As a Post editorial noted last year, at a time when Trump said that the election was being rigged against him, “a comprehensive analysis from Arizona State University’s News21 project found only 2,068 accusations of voter fraud between 2000 and 2012. A mere 7.4 percent of those involved double voting. Voter impersonation, the sort of fraud that voter-ID laws are designed to combat, accounted for 0.5 percent of recorded fraud allegations. The United States runs one of the cleanest election systems in the world. There simply is no national voting fraud crisis.”

Allegations of widespread in-person voting fraud rely not on evidence, but on rhetoric, innuendo and credulous people so blindly partisan that they will accept these as evidence.

Republicans pass voter ID laws to try to prevent Democrats from winning, with requirements that disproportionately affect poor minorities. They add hassle for some people and not others, and they force vulnerable people without the specified ID to worry about signing their name to an affidavit, under threat of prosecution, just to be able to vote. The point is to get as close to imposing voter suppression rules — such as the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow South — as the courts will let them.

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