This week a Federal Court held that Texas had failed to show that its new voter ID law would not impair the voting rights of minorities. The Federal Court denied Texas’s request for judicial preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. § 1973c) on the grounds that the law was “retrogressive.” The Federal Court also noted that Texas had “completely missed the point of Section 5” by contending that voters who did not abide by Texas’s new voting ID procedure had simply chosen not to vote.