Supreme Court Upholds Voter ID Law

The Supreme Court, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, upheld an Indiana law requiring voters to present government issued photo identification to vote in person.  This law has evoked strong emotions on the part of those who believe that is unconstitutional.  Judge Evans, of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, characterized the law as a “a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” The dissenting opinion by Justice Souter similarly concludes that the law:

crosses a line when it targets the poor and the weak. If the Court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections, 383 U. S. 663 (1966), stands for anything, it is that being poor has nothing to do with being qualified to vote . . . . The State’s requirements here, that people without cars travel to a motor vehicle registry and that the poor who fail to do that get to their county seats within 10 days of every election, likewise translate into unjustified economic burdens uncomfortably close to the outright $1.50 fee we struck down 42 years ago. Like that fee, 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.

On the other hand, Justice Scalia (concurring) was of the opinion that

The universally applicable requirements of Indiana's voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing, and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not “even represent a significant increase over the usual bur­dens of voting.” And the State’s interests are sufficient to sustain that minimal bur­den. That should end the matter.

(internal citation omitted).  It will be interesting to see what the outcome of Indiana’s law is over time, and whether other States enact similar laws.