Editorials
Will state ever admit to voter ID law’s real intent?
Disappointed but not surprised.
That pretty much sums up our reaction to the ruling this past week by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Indiana’s voter ID law. In a 2-1 split, the three-judge panel ruled that, while the 1-year-old law likely would not affect many voters, its potential inclines toward helping rather than harming.
Potential was all the panel had to go on. Neither the plaintiffs — the American Civil Liberties Union and Indiana’s Democratic Party — nor the defendants — the state — could come up with a Hoosier who had been prohibited by the law from voting or an incidence of voter fraud that would have been derailed by a photo ID.
Two of the judges apparently were more impressed with the state’s hypotheticals.
Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for the majority, said “the inability of the sponsors of this litigation to find any such person to join as a plaintiff suggests that the motivation for the suit is simply that the law may require the Democratic Party and the other organizational plaintiffs to work harder to get every last one of their supporters to the polls.”
Posner didn’t mention that the law, designed and passed by a Republican majority, looks to a lot of people like a move by GOP legislators whose motivation was simply to make it harder for Democrats to get some of their traditional supporters — the poor and minorities — to the polls.
Judge Terence T. Evans is one of those people. In his dissent from the other two judges, he minced no words.
“Let’s not beat around the bush,” Evans wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
We would like to echo Judge Evans’ assessment. We would also urge Ken Falk, the legal director of the Indiana ACLU, to press his clients, as he said he would, to file for a rehearing of the case before the full 7th Circuit Court panel.
A bad law upheld by two judges does not make a good law. Indiana’s photo voter ID requirements, which are the most cumbersome in the 50 states, may be legal for now, but they aren’t right.
Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University, is one of a few dozen Americans who actually have studied voter fraud instead of using the specter of it to make political hay. His research and that of the federal U.S. Election Assistance Committee strongly indicate that strict voter ID laws such as Indiana’s are, at best, an antidote in search of a poison.
Not only is the incidence of documented voter fraud minuscule, in cases where it has occurred, tightly specified photo identification either wasn’t an issue or wouldn’t have prevented the fraud.
In an interview in November with the Tribune-Star, Overton said that politicians and ordinary citizens have “embraced flawed assumptions by relying on a story or two about voter fraud,” stories that often turn out to omit information or contain major errors.
A Harvard Law School grad and former U.S. Court of Appeals law clerk, Overton compared the spate of new voter ID laws (almost always passed by GOP bodies) to gerrymandering.
“This is not about individuals, it’s about reducing voter turnout in particular pockets, and that is affecting elections,” he said.
Unlike the two 7th Circuit Court judges, Overton sees the potential for harm in laws such as Indiana’s far outweighing the potential for help. So does Judge Evans, and so do we.
If it takes a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, so be it. Maybe by then, even Indiana’s legislators will have studied the bona fide evidence, not just half-baked anecdotes, and agree with Overton that photo ID requirements “throw out the baby with the bath water because there is a drop of bath water on the baby’s arm.”
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