Votes don’t grow on trees
Apr 28, 2008 Lex scripta, Oppression
SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS Indiana’s voter ID law: “The Supreme Court has ruled that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights.” Seems reasonable to me.
Amazingly, it didn’t to three justices.
Why do I have a feeling — without the decision being available yet — I can guess who they [Souter-Stevens-Ginsberg-Breyer] are?
UPDATE: Stevens actually wrote the majority opinion, interestingly. Jack Balkin writes:
In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court continues a trend of using technical doctrines of facial challenges to swat away constitutional litigation and drive questions back to the political process. Whether you think that is a good or a bad thing depends on your view of whether the Indiana legislature was essentially limiting access to the ballot to certain classes of voters in order to help the Republican Party stay in power. If you think that the political process will take care of enfranchising these voters, you need not worry too much about the result. If, on the other hand, you think that the political process is being used to build in advantages for one party over another, there is greater reason to be concerned.
That’s his first paragraph, his topic paragraph. He uses the word “constitutional” once, and never in a substantive way. In other words, Balkin does not like the policy of the U.S. Supreme Court. But he doesn’t seem to have much of a constitutional or legal argument — spot the word “technical”? — to make.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Oddly enough, Stevens voted with the majority — and wrote for them too.
I’m with the ACLU on this one and was disappointed in the decision. After all, everyone agreed that there wasn’t any significant amount of “voter impersonation” going on. If anything, the problems lie elsewhere, e.g., voting precincts that get one voting machine per election, driving up wait times and sending people home before being able to vote, etc.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I live in Marion County (Indianapolis), where we have the normal, sleazy Democratic machine politics. It’s encouraging to know that law and order has been imposed on the voting process.
It’s well known that we can barely walk out of the house anymore without some kind of ID; the rejected claims about voter suppression were ludicrous. Since the law was passed, I found no ID-related delays any time I voted. As expected, people whip out their IDs, sign in, then vote easily the legal way.
Any voting delays in recent elections here have been caused by the massive arrogance + incompetence of the Democratic County Clerk.