Supreme Court Endorses Voter ID - Helping America Not to Vote

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that "states may require voters to present photo identification before casting ballots, upholding "an Indiana state law that requires voters to show a current government-sponsored photo ID." The law is generally regarded as the strictest in the nationbecause it "requires a voter to present a photograph as part of an unexpired document issued either by Indiana or the federal government." In most cases, such a requirement "can be satisfied only by a current driver's license or a passport," which critics "say discourages voting among the elderly and the poor." The lead opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, argued that Indiana has a "valid interest in protecting 'the integrity and reliability of the electoral process." However, "the case contained 'no evidence' of the type of voter fraud the law was ostensibly devised to detect and deter." Writing in dissent, Justice David Souter "said that for those on whom the law had an impact, the burden was 'serious' and the state had failed to justify it." Though the ruling leaves "the door open to future lawsuits" that provide more evidence of discouragement and disenfranchisement, critics of voter ID laws worry "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." Yesterday's decision "is not the end of the story on voter ID," said Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "Now it's up to legislators and courts" in the states to decide "if they are going to follow Indiana's lead" or "if they're going to protect the right to vote for all Americans."

A PROBLEM THAT HARDLY EXISTS: In his dissenting opinion, Souter noted that Indiana adopted its excessively restrictive voter ID law "without a shred of evidence that in-person voter impersonation is a problem in the state, much less a crisis." In fact, the evidence cited by Stevens in his lead opinion is so thin that he was forced to go back to the era of Boss Tweed -- 140 years ago -- "to describe the corrosive effects of widespread fraud at polling places." Of the 38 cases of voter fraud the Justice Department prosecuted between 2002 and 2005, 14 were thrown out. In fact, due to a lack of credible studies to back up their allegations of voter fraud, conservatives have been forced to establish a front group led by the general counsel of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign to create such reports. Despite the lack of evidence that voter fraud is a problem, the court's ruling places "virtually all the burden of proof on plaintiffs seeking to argue that laws illegally restrict their voting rights," which experts say "makes it much tougher for voting rights groups to prevail in court." [MORE]