A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court Saturday upheld Texas' strict new voter identification law.

Issued around 5 a.m., the decision was not signed and offered no explanation for upholding the 2011 law requiring voters to show photo identification before being allowed to vote.

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A dissent offered by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said the law risked denying voting privileges to "hundreds of thousands of eligible voters." Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined her in dissent.

The order was an interim measure responding to emergency applications filed by the state of Texas Wednesday to overcome a trial judge's ruling throwing out the law. It allows the new voting rules to apply to this year's election. Absentee voting was scheduled to begin Monday.

Photo ID's could be presented in the form of a Texas driver's license, passport, military ID or even a gun license. Ginsburg said this might prevent 600,000 registered voters, nearly 5 percent of the Texas electorate, from voting, including "a sharply disproportionate percentage of Hispanic and African-American registered voters. She called the new law 'the strictest regime of the country."

Texas officials said Ginsburg's statements about disenfranchising thousands of voters was preposterous. Attorney General Eric Holder called the Supreme court decision "a major step backward."

The interim order allowing the new Texas ID voting law was similar to orders allowing similarly stringent voting laws to go forward in North Carolina and Ohio. The majority of conservative justices said changing state laws so close to elections was confusing. However, Wisconsin's new voter ID law was blocked because absentee ballots already had been sent out without any mention of the need for a photo ID.

Ginsburg went on her scathing dissent to say that Texans without photo identification cards had to pay to get one, similar to poll taxes that were struck down in the 1960s. She said birth certificates that were allowed as voter identification documents cost $22 and even cut-rate birth certificates sold for $2 or $3 to satisfy the law weren't acceptable because nobody knew they were available. "Even at $2, the toll is at odds with this court's precedent," she said in her dissent.

The Texas law previously had been blocked under the federal Voting Rights Act that called for states with past voting discrimination to get federal permission to enforce changes in voting laws. However, the Supreme Court struck down that law last year.

Tagsvoting, supreme court, court, supreme, Texas, election, justice, identification, November