Court Upholds Voter ID LawFinally, the country will be rescued from its long nightmare struggle with voter fraud! And if certain voters find it harder to get their ballot cast, then so be it.
The Supreme Court has ruled that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights. The decision validates Republican-inspired voter ID laws.
The court vote 6-3 to uphold Indiana’s strict photo ID requirement. Democrats and civil rights groups say the law would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots.
As those who have followed this issue will remember, this is not a surprise. As Jeffrey Toobin put it early this year:
As a general matter, in recent years the Court has been reluctant to find what is charged in this case: a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. (The notable exception, to belabor the issue, was for a plaintiff named George W. Bush.) In the end, though, it will not be the judiciary that rescues democracy; whatever the obstacles, the problems with the ballot box must be solved at the ballot box.
A little more detail in an update from the AP:
The law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,'” Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy.
Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented….
“We cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters,” Stevens said.
Stevens’ opinion suggests that the outcome could be different in a state where voters could provide evidence that their rights had been impaired.
But in dissent, Souter said Indiana’s voter ID law “threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens.”
Update: Here are excerpts from the opinions from the AP.
Update: Some thoughts on the decision by voting law expert Rick Hasen.
Update: And here’s Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) response:
Today the Supreme Court failed to protect access to the ballot box for some of the most vulnerable Americans. We have seen an effort by this administration, its political appointees and some partisans to use the specter of purported “voter fraud” for political advantage. They do so at the expense of vulnerable communities and have excluded millions of elderly, low-income, disabled, and minority voters, even though in-person voter fraud has been proven time and time again to be a myth.
Justice Souter’s dissent rightly observed that “[i]t is simply not plausible to assume here, with no evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud in a State, and very little of it nationwide, that a public perception of such fraud is nevertheless ‘inherent’ in an election system providing severe criminal penalties for fraud and mandating signature checks at the polls. … The State’s requirements here, that people without cars travel to a motor vehicle registry and that the poor who fail to do that get to their county seats within 10 days of every election, likewise translate into unjustified economic burdens uncomfortably close to the outright $1.50 fee we struck down 42 years ago. Like that fee, the onus of the Indiana law is illegitimate just because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise.”
The evidence in the Crawford case did not allow the Court to evaluate the impact it will have on voters in Indiana, so it is not a blanket endorsement of the constitutionality of laws requiring voters to present photo identification. However, the impact of the Court’s divided holding could embolden those partisans determined to use restrictive voter identification laws to elevate politics over fairness and inclusion. It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court could not come to a meaningful consensus which would have provided guidance to other States considering such legislation.
I wish the Court instead had drawn a clear line in favor of expanding access to the fundamental franchise of voting. For far too long, our nation tolerated the gulf between our foundational principles and the voting experience for many Americans. We endured a shameful history of barriers erected around the ballot box. Now is not the time to turn back the clock to the days of disenfranchising laws supposedly designed to “protect” the polls. Now more than ever, the myth of in-person voter fraud should not be used to suppress the democratic participation of the American people.
Nothing is more central to our democracy, and to American citizenship, than the right to vote. It is fundamental because it secures the effectiveness of other constitutional rights. Denying a fundamental right — the right to vote — because a person is indigent, lacks a birth certificate, or has no access to a vehicle, goes against America’s better values. As the world’s model for democracy, we are a better nation than that.
