National Review link:
In reading the Division’s complaint, I was reminded of the opening con in the 1973 movie The Sting, because the complaint is filled with the same type of misdirection intended to distract the audience. For example, it outlines the different percentages of black, Hispanic, and white populations in Texas. But it first uses total population, which includes lots of people who aren’t eligible to vote. It then lists voting-age population percentages, which is also a largely useless figure because of the significant number of Hispanics who are not citizens and African Americans who are convicted felons, and, therefore, not eligible to vote. It finally gives the percentages by voting-age members of the franchise, after having confused this issue with information not relevant to the number of individuals affected by a voter-ID law. (This is compounded by its use of surname-analysis to identify Hispanics, a notoriously inaccurate analysis tool.)
The complaint lists the poverty levels, income data, and car-ownership rates of blacks and Hispanics in comparison with whites. It makes a big deal out of the claim that Hispanics and blacks experience poverty at higher rates than whites, but this is completely irrelevant to the voting discrimination claim in the complaint. Being poor is not a protected class under the Voting Rights Act, and the total number of poor whites in the state is actually larger than the total number of poor Hispanics and blacks. Justice is trying to claim that if a voting law somehow affects poor people more than others (and it has no evidence that is true), because of racially disparate poverty rates, it is voting discrimination and therefore violates Section 2. Holder is trying to bootstrap an unprotected class of voters onto a class of voters protected under the law.
More at link.