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Friday, September 28, 2007

Courts - More on Indiana Voter ID Law goes to Supreme Court

Daniel P. Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University, where he teaches election law, has an Op-Ed piece today in the LA Times. It begins:

The U.S. Supreme Court announced this week that it would hear a challenge to an Indiana law that requires people to show government-issued photo identification in order to have their votes counted. Two other states have passed such laws in recent years, and others have debated the issue. Promoters of these laws argue that they are needed to prevent fraud. Opponents claim that they will impede eligible citizens from voting -- a disproportionate number of them poor, elderly, disabled or racial minorities.

In fact, there's reason to believe that suppressing turnout is precisely the motivation behind the strictest voter ID laws. There are almost no documented cases of people pretending to be someone they're not at the polls, the only "problem" that these laws purport to address. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that requiring ID will suppress turnout among some groups of voters.

From an editorial today in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:
A sharply divided Supreme Court could issue a sharply divided opinion in its review of Indiana’s restrictive voter identification law. But it’s gratifying to see the decision won’t rest with the Court of Appeals and on Judge Richard Posner’s troubling views on the value of voting.

The high court’s decision will represent a test to more than Indiana’s law, which was challenged in two separate suits now consolidated by the Supreme Court. As it did in the Indiana General Assembly, support for voter-ID laws elsewhere breaks clearly on partisan lines. Indeed, Posner’s ruling conceded that the voters who most likely don’t have photo identification are those “low on the economic ladder” and thus are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates. Posner was joined in affirming the lower court decision by Judge Diane Sykes, another Republican appointee. Judge Terence T. Evans, who dissented, was a Democratic appointee.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 28, 2007 08:46 AM
Posted to Courts in general