Before dawn on Saturday morning, the Supreme Court issued a terse, unsigned ruling that, in effect, endorsed Texas’s voter-ID law, the most restrictive such law in the nation.

On October 9, in a 147-page opinion that followed a two-week trial on the facts, the Federal District Court in Corpus Christi had struck down the law, known as Senate Bill 14, as patently discriminatory, the equivalent of a poll tax. A week later that court’s injunction was overturned by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Appeals Court for the Fifth Circuit. It was this stay of the injunction — in effect a decision to let the voter-ID law go into effect — that the Supreme Court left in place in on Saturday with its 57-word decision. The decision did not articulate the Court’s reasoning, but a blistering dissent made clear that its basis was not Senate Bill 14, but rather the confusion that a change so close to the election might create.

Excerpts of that dissent, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are below. For ease of reading citations are omitted, but they can be found in the full text here.

I would not upset the District Court’s reasoned, record-based judgment, which the Fifth Circuit accorded little, if any, deference … The fact-intensive nature of this case does not justify the Court of Appeals’ stay order; to the contrary, the Fifth Circuit’s refusal to home in on the facts found by the district court is precisely why this Court should vacate the stay….

[T]here is little risk that the District Court’s injunction will in fact disrupt Texas’ electoral processes. Texas need only reinstate the voter identification procedures it employed for ten years (from 2003 to 2013) and in five federal general elections. To date, the new regime, Senate Bill 14, has been applied in only three low participation elections—namely, two statewide primaries and one statewide constitutional referendum, in which voter turnout ranged from 1.48% to 9.98%. The November 2014 election would be the very first federal general election conducted under Senate Bill 14’s regime. In all likelihood, then, Texas’ poll workers are at least as familiar with Texas’ pre-Senate Bill 14 procedures as they are with the new law’s requirements….

Senate Bill 14 replaced the previously existing voter identification requirements with the strictest regime in the country. The Bill requires in-person voters to present one of a limited number of government issued photo identification documents. …Those who lack the approved forms of identification may obtain an “election identification certificate” from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), but more than 400,000 eligible voters face round-trip travel times of three hours or more to the nearest DPS office. Moreover, applicants for an election identification certificate ordinarily must present a certified birth certificate. A birth certificate, however, can be obtained only at significant cost—at least $22 for a standard certificate sent by mail. And although reduced-fee birth certificates may be obtained for $2 to $3, the State did not publicize that option on DPS’s Web site or on Department of Health and Human Services forms for requesting birth certificates.

On an extensive factual record developed in the course of a nine-day trial, the District Court found Senate Bill 14 irreconcilable with §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose and would yield a prohibited discriminatory result. The District Court emphasized the “virtually unchallenged” evidence that Senate Bill 14 “bear[s] more heavily on” minority voters. In light of the “seismic demographic shift” in Texas between 2000 and 2010, making Texas a “majority-minority state,” the District Court observed that the Texas Legislature and Governor had an evident incentive to “gain partisan advantage by suppressing” the “votes of African-Americans and Latinos.”

The District Court also found a tenuous connection between the harms Senate Bill 14 aimed to ward off, and the means adopted by the State to that end. Between 2002 and 2011, there were only two in-person voter fraud cases prosecuted to conviction in Texas. Despite awareness of the Bill’s adverse effect on eligible-to-vote minorities, the Texas Legislature rejected a “litany of ameliorative amendments” designed to lessen the Bill’s impact on minority voters—for example, amendments permitting additional forms of identification, eliminating fees, providing indigence exceptions, and increasing voter education and funding—without undermining the Bill’s purported policy justifications. Texas did not begin to demonstrate that the Bill’s discriminatory features were necessary to prevent fraud or to increase public confidence in the electoral process…. On this plain evidence, the District Court concluded that the Bill would not have been enacted absent its racially disparate effects….

Under Senate Bill 14, a cost attends every form of qualified identification available to the general public. Texas tells the Court that any number of incidental costs are associated with voting. But the cost at issue here is one deliberately imposed by the State. Even at $2, the toll is at odds with this Court’s precedent. And for some voters, the imposition is not small. A voter whose birth certificate lists her maiden name or misstates her date of birth may be charged $37 for the amended certificate she needs to obtain a qualifying ID. Texas voters born in other States may be required to pay substantially more than that.

The potential magnitude of racially discriminatory voter disenfranchisement counseled hesitation before disturbing the District Court’s findings and final judgment. Senate Bill 14 may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5% of all registered voters) from voting in person for lack of compliant identification. A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic.

Unsurprisingly, Senate Bill 14 did not survive federal preclearance under §5 of the Voting Rights Act…. [R]racial discrimination in elections inTexas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary,Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970. The District Court noted particularly plaintiffs’ evidence—largely unchallenged by Texas— regarding the State’s long history of official discrimination in voting, the statewide existence of racially polarized voting, the incidence of overtly racial political campaigns,the disproportionate lack of minority elected officials, and the failure of elected officials to respond to the concerns of minority voters.

The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. To prevent that disenfranchisement, I would vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay of the permanent injunction ordered by the District Court.