Court Upholds Voter ID Law
‘The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law on Monday, concluding in a splintered decision that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote,’ the New York Times reports. Six of the Justice voted to uphold the law, three voted against it.
The 6-to-3 ruling kept the door open to future lawsuits that provided more evidence. But this theoretical possibility was small comfort to the dissenters or to critics of voter ID laws, who predicted that a more likely outcome than successful lawsuits would be the spread of measures that would keep some legitimate would-be voters from the polls.
Voting experts said the ruling was likely to complicate election administration, leading to both more litigation and more legislation, at least in states with Republican legislative majorities, but would probably have a limited impact on this year’s presidential voting.
The issue has been intensely partisan, with Republicans supporting increased identification requirements for voters and Democrats opposing them. In what the court described as the “lead opinion,” which was written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court acknowledged that the record of the case contained “no evidence” of the type of voter fraud the law was ostensibly devised to detect and deter, the effort by a voter to cast a ballot in another person’s name.
But Justice Stevens said that neither was there “any concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters who now lack photo identification.” The “risk of voter fraud” was “real,” he said, and there was “no question about the legitimacy or importance of the state’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.”
The three others who made up the majority, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said in an opinion by Justice Scalia that the law was so obviously justified as “a generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation” that there was no basis for scrutinizing the record to assess the impact on any individual voters. “This is an area where the dos and don’ts need to be known in advance of the election,” Justice Scalia said.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice David H. Souter said that for those on whom the law had an impact, the burden was “serious” and the state had failed to justify it. Like the Virginia poll tax the court struck down 42 years ago, he said, “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 other dissenters were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
All objective analysis aside, this entire debate is silly. Of course you need to be able to prove that you are who you say you are when you’re going out to vote. That isn’t a “burden,” it’s completely and utterly logical. When I go to vote, I’m also supposed to take my ID or passport with me (that’s the ID / passport you can travel with). It has information about me on it, my name, photo, and so on. I’ve never heard a Dutch person complain about that… at all.
If people want to vote, they should be able to prove that they are who they say they are. If they don’t want to do so, they shouldn’t complain when someone tells them they can’t vote.
In my humble Dutch opinion that is.
The decision was the CORRECT one. We ask people for all kinds of IDs for just about EVERYTHING these days, so why should something as IMPORTANT to our Representative Democracy as voting be any different?