The Justice Department has again gone on record supporting strict documentary identification requirements for voters, despite the fact that such laws disenfranchise voters. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board. Crawford plaintiffs allege that Indiana’s photo ID requirements unfairly burden those “low on the income ladder” and, as such, are unconstitutional. In response, Ms. Maxine Nelson, President of Project Vote, had the following statement:
“The Justice Department’s friend of the court brief in support of Indiana’s voter identification requirement is the latest in a long series of Department actions that contribute to disenfranchising minority and low-income Americans. At best, the Department has been negligent in enforcing voting rights. At worst, the Department has instituted rules and regulations that allow partisans to manipulate the voting system.
In the past seven years, the Department’s Voting Section has brought only one case on behalf of Blacks and none on behalf of Native Americans. The Voting Section has also neglected to enforce the provisions of federal law that could significantly increase voter registration. In the past four years, the Department has supported the use of partisan election challengers, narrowly interpreted Help America Vote Act’s (HAVA) provisionally voting requirements to the detriment of voters and has pressured states to purge their voter rolls.
The documentary ID requirements at issue in the Crawford case significantly threaten the ability of many Indianans to vote. Research shows that young, poor, minority and elderly voters are more likely to lack photographic identification. A University of Washington study, for example, found that 22 percent of African American voters lack proper identification compared to 16 percent of white voters. Twenty-one percent of voters earning less than $40,000 a year do not have the necessary ID compared to 13 percent of those earning more than $40,000.
The Justice Department’s claim that Indiana’s identification requirement is warranted by the threat of fraudulent voting is undermined by their own statistics. Despite special programs such as the Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative, the Justice Department has been able to convict only 25 people of fraudulent voting between 2002 and 2005. The State of Indiana has acknowledged that there is no instance of anyone being charged in the state’s history for impersonating a voter in order to cast a ballot, the only crime which documentary ID may prevent. There is, however, a long history in America of partisans using claims of voter fraud to manipulate the electorate for political advantage.
The Department’s decision to file a friend of the court brief in support of Indiana’s voter ID law shows that Attorney General Mukasey is following in the footsteps of his immediate predecessors rather than living up to his promise restore integrity to a Justice Department. “