One of the country’s most contentious voting rights issues came back into the spotlight last Thursday when an Indiana court struck down the state’s strict photo voter ID law as unconstitutional. The law, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, was found be in violation of the Indiana Constitution because it treated voters unequally.
According to the Indianapolis Star, the three-judge panel held that the law—one of the country’s toughest voter ID requirements—unfairly exempts absentee voters (the main source of voter fraud) and residents of state-licensed care facilities that happen to be polling places. This exemption, the court contends, is in violation of the state constitution’s Equal Privileges and Immunities Clause, which provides that “the General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen or class of citizens, privileges or immunities which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.”
“Under Indiana law, the court said, it might be reasonable to regulate absentee balloting more stringently than in-person balloting,” the New York Times reported. “But the voter ID law does the opposite, the judges said, by imposing ‘a less stringent requirement for absentee voters than for those voting in person.’”
Voter ID laws have gained a reputation for being the product of partisan politics, with Republican policymakers pushing such measures to fight the extremely rare phenomenon of polling-place voter fraud, while Democratic leaders assert that voter ID unnecessarily disenfranchises the country’s young, minority, and low-income voters. Evidence of either have been difficult to prove on a substantial scale, though plaintiffs challenging the law in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections were “primarily criticized for their failure to generate firm evidence of disfranchisement,” according to a recent Indiana University School of Law report that examines and documents voter disenfranchisement as a result voter ID in Indiana in 2008.
“Our research helps begin to fill this gap in the plaintiffs’ case and presents the clearest evidence yet that photo identification has a disfranchising impact on hundreds of persons who want to have their democratic voice heard.”
The report surveys “92 counties in Indiana to determine how many persons arrived at the polls without valid identification, cast a provisional ballot, and then had that provisional ballot counted.” Out of 2.8 million votes cast in Indiana on Election Day 2008, it was determined that at least 900 votes were not counted due to lack of sufficient ID. (More than 1,000 people arrived at the polls without valid ID and voted provisionally – only 137 of those votes were actually counted.)
“The major difference between the state court decision and the Supreme Court’s decision …is that the state court was interpreting the Indiana Constitution, while the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution of the United States,” the Times reported. “Generally, state courts are given the last word in interpreting their own constitutions.”
In spite of both evidence of disenfranchisement and violations of the Indiana Constitution, state officials “ridiculed the decision and said it would be appealed to the State Supreme Court,” according to the Times. “At a news conference, Gov. Mitch Daniels, a second-term Republican, called the ruling ‘preposterous’ and said that ‘there’s nothing in the Indiana Constitution that goes beyond what the federal Constitution provides here.’”
The controversial – and now unconstitutional law – set a precedent for more than 25 state legislatures that introduced similar measures during the 2009 legislative sessions. So far, Utah is the only state to enact such a bill this year, which was reportedly implemented with few problems, though it was tested in a low-turnout election, according to the Associated Press last week.