Unfortunately, it can't happen until 2009 when we have a Democrat in the White House. The Congress needs to use the powers given to it under the 14th Amendment to pass federal legislation that prevents these types of state laws. This is a complete slap in the face of the idea of equal protection.

In fact, there are all kinds of ways in which the process of voting and the nuts and bolts of democracy in this country (redistricting processes, vote counting and paper trails) need to be dramatically changed.

We need to face facts, that 20 out of 28 years of Republican Presidencies and the conservative domination of the courts have done tremendous damage to this country. We will need a much more activist Congress to undo many of these decisions.  

Especially when the state of Indiana provides one for free to every citizen, and voters who don't have one can cast a provisional ballot and present their ID within a week. It's no real wonder that Justice Stevens supported the decision and wrote the majority opinion; the only wonder is on what Constitutional grounds the other three justices felt they were standing on in trying to prevent the state of Indiana from upholding the legitimacy of it's electoral process. I thought maybe this time they discovered yet another as-of-yet unheard truth in the Constitution with which to justify their steamrolling of the state legislature.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out who all these elderly people, poor people, and students are who don't have a photo ID.  Forget about driving or boarding an airplane.  Lots of people don't do that.  But, you have to have a photo ID to cash a Social Security check or to open a bank account, you have to have a photo ID to collect unemployment benefits or food stamps, you have to have a photo ID to use Medicare (or any other health insurance), you have to have a photo ID to pick up many prescription drugs such as codene.  Exactly who doesn't have a photo ID that they can present at the polls except for people who are not lawfully registered to vote or are attempting to vote multiple times?  Is that who Howard Dean and the LOWV want to enfranchise?

And, BTW, if you don't think that serious voter fraud occurs then you have never been to Chicago or Philadelphia.

they have to order up an official birth certificate and go to the registrar before the election (ahead of time).  The cost of the official copy and the cost of a cab ride or even a bus ride is more (adjusted for inflation) than previous poll taxes.  

There is little evidence that "voter fraud" is much of a problem.  On the other hand, certainly, malfeasance by Republicans in Ohio (even in Virginia) vote suppression, machine scoring negatives (as they did for Al Gore in 2000 in Volushia County, FL), existed on the other hand.   In Calif half of all new voters were "spit out" of the system" because of input errors by officials or failure to match a phony Republican Contracted database.  It is similar to when tens of thousands of innocent Floridians were wrongfully said to be "felons," and were purged from the roles.  Many have never been able to clear themselves.  Where is the court dealing with any of those problems?

Instead, it once again delimits, one voter at a time, Constitutional rights.  

It is not the duty of the Supreme Court to go out into the country and find problems to fix. There is a process for cases to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Moreover, while we can debate the merit of the ruling, the only factor that should affect their decision is whether the Indiana law is unconstitutional, which it is plainly not. If the voters of Indiana don't like the law, they should petition their state government to change it, and if they care strongly enough, they should vote out the legislators who enacted it and vote in ones who will change it.

Nonetheless, voter fraud is a serious issue, and I don't subscribe to the belief, as some have, that it must reach epidemic levels before it is confronted. If there is a potential for fraud, why not prevent it from happening before it happens?

Hysterical arguments about limiting the right to vote are just that: hysterical. The state makes it abundantly easy to receive a photo ID, which is necessary anyways for many important daily functions, which is why Justice Stevens found that there was no onerous burden placed on the voter in order to vote.

with a ruling by the right-wing Supreme Court?  Oh, and please provide evidence that voter fraud is a serious issue anywhere in this country. Right, it's not.

Voter fraud isn't prosecuted therefore it isn't a serious issue.

Hmmm...but how does it get prosecuted if you don't have laws and procedures that allow you to detect it.  Think of it this way:  how many drivers speed but never get ticketed?  Are you trying to tell us, Lowell, that speeding is not an issue in northern Virginia?  If not, then what is all the noise about speed cameras?  If no one is speeding, then who cares if the police have speed cameras?

because it almost never occurs. In fact, I defy you to find any instance of voter fraud -- I don't believe even the state of Indiana, arguing before the Supreme Court, was able to do so.

From the Guardian newspaper:

The ruling comes just in time for Indiana's presidential primary on May 6, in which a significant number of new voters are expected to turn out. Conservatives have cheered the decision, claiming that it will prevent widespread voter fraud. "Today's ruling rightfully allows states to safeguard against such destructive abuse," said House minority leader John Boehner.

The problem with this assumption is that there is no record of such in-person fraud ever occurring in Indiana. Even justice John Paul Stevens admitted as much in his opinion, on which he was joined by chief justice John Roberts and justice Anthony Kennedy.

And to solve this non-problem?

In Indiana, 13% of registered voters lack the documents needed to obtain a license, and therefore, cast a ballot. These restrictions disproportionately affect not only low-income, minority and elderly voters, but also disabled, homeless, transgender and urban residents, leading to lower levels of voter participation.

Additionally, these affected voters tend to vote Democratic, as Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales were more than aware. A 2007 study (pdf) for the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity and Race found that just 81.7% of Democrats in Indiana have access to a photo ID, compared with 86.2% of Republicans.

Who wrote the majority opinion? Justice Stevens. I would have a hard time calling him part of the "right-wing" Supreme Court.

Moreover, as I pointed out before, please tell me what part of the Constitution the Indiana law violates, that would require the Supreme Court to overturn it?

Finally, the potential of voter fraud is serious enough that I don't see why we should wait until it becomes widespread to enact legislation to prevent it.

So: A law that is a solution in search of a problem is a proper remedy to combat a societal ill that is a pure urban legend, even if it provably reduces the participation of lower socioeconomic groups in the electoral franchise.

I remember when conservatives were those that were skeptical and hostile to the machinations and inventions of government when there was no serious problem to address. But that was a long time ago.

As for which parts of the constitution it violates, well, firstly, this: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Federal citizenship rights. It is a privilege of citizenship to be able to vote. It is most definitely an equal protection problem when certain classes of citizens (the elderly, the impoverished, the disabled, and certain ethnic minorities) are disproportionately affected by a law, especially when there is no actual underlying problem to be remedied.

How about this: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax."

The 14th and 24th Amendments would lead a judiciary that was properly concerned about balancing 'remedies' against their side-effects to conclude that the scope of equal protection infringements under this type of legislation was vastly out of proportion to the 'benefits' received (which there are almost none, since voter fraud has almost never been proven to have occurred in this country).  

n/t

The article in the Guardian that Lowell cites says that 86.2% of Republicans in Indiana have "access to a photo ID" (I'm not sure what 'access' means) while 81.7% of Democrats do.  I'll bet you that the 4.5% differential is very close to, if not within, the margin of error of the study.  So, statistically, there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans in Indiana who don't have a photo ID.

Explain to me again how this is a Republican voter suppression conspiracy?

is to reduce the participation of lower income groups.

Look, I'll even stipulate that, somewhere in the US, sometime, there have almost certainly been a few instances of a few shady characters trying to game the system and voting illegally. But the remedy is wholly disproportionate to the actual alleged 'problem' that needs solving.

There are very poor elderly people, for instance, that move to new states and don't have any proper documentation to obtain birth certificates. They have to pay to obtain new birth certificates or other documentation necessary to obtain these 'free' photo IDs. That's arguably a poll tax.

My larger point was that the text and the structure of the 14th and 24th Amendments would lead an honest broker to realize that the Constitution has been amended at least twice (actually three times, including the 15th Amendment) to stipulate that voting rights are amongst the most important guaranteed citizenship rights under our Constitution.

The people passing and trying to implement these laws care not one whit about that principle that has been carved and re-carved into our majestic founding document. If they showed any good faith -- any -- in dealing with this problem, I'd give your arguments more credence (just to be clear, I'm not saying that you yourself aren't arguing from good faith, just the Republican elites and Federalist society nimrods that try and pass these laws).

I'll even stipulate that the appearance or possibility of voter fraud is a legitimate worry -- but it's just not something that happens with any frequency. However, we know for damned sure that states go out of there way to prevent ex-felons from voting, that they purge voter rolls in ways that disproportionately affect blacks and other minorities, and that political prosecutions of voter registration groups have been pursued in order to try and reduce participation by blacks. It's the whole canvas, together, that makes the intent clear.

If a state said, "You know, we want people to have faith in the electoral system, but we don't want to impose an undue burden on citizens to vote, especially in a way that appears to discriminate against certain sub-groups", and then passed legislation that adequately balanced all those competing goals, including provisions that bent over backwards to include those that are poor and often discriminated against, then we'd be having a different argument. But Indiana couldn't provide one factual instance of illegal voting (the Justices themselves just invented urban legends to fill in the blanks). And we know what the end result will be -- it will be much harder for certain groups to vote.

That's unjust, unequal, and flat out wrong.  

You can dismiss out-of-hand the possibility of any serious voter fraud issues, but you can create out of thin air an entire fabric of systematic, conspiratorial, voter suppression.  Just who are these "very poor elderly people, for instance, that move to new states and don't have any proper documentation to obtain birth certificates?"  I haven't noticed that poor, elderly people are that prone to re-location.  Quite the opposite would seem to be the case.  What do you base your massive re-location theory on?

You didn't answer the question, Ron.  If the number of Republicans and Democrats who lack a photo ID is statistically a wash, then how do the Republicans benefit from denying poll access to people without a photo ID?  

This is inherently a fact-based question. Why is it that there are essentially zero (0) provable instances of voting fraud?

You decided out-of-hand that a 4.5% difference between Republicans and Democrats is no difference at all, based on margin of error. Until you can produce this margin of error to corroborate your theory, I think the burden's on you. Based on the facts at hand, we don't have any proven instances in Indiana of voter fraud, but we do know that Democrats are affected more than Republicans (I actually think D vs R is the incorrect metric to use, I'd rather see differences in various ethnic and socioeconomic groups, and then we'd really see what's what).

So, I don't accept the premise of your question until you prove your theory. Until then, it looks like a skewed effect to combat a non-existent problem, which is exactly the case.

As for the 'conspiracy' to suppress voting, well, it exists. Granted, I didn't provide any links, but I promise you it comes from lots of reading and not out of thin air. Still, I'll see if I can find some links talking about these things. Josh Marshall and Scott Horton have been talking about these things for a while now.

Equal protection is all about not discriminating against certain groups unjustly, and surely not when there is no compelling state interest. There's been no state interest demonstrated here. I even stipulated in my earlier response that I could see a situation where, balanced against equitable access to the franchise, I'd be happy to consider safeguards against fraud. But you refuse to at all acknowledge that a law that might disproportionately affect the poor, elderly, and disabled might be unjust.  

You decided out-of-hand that a 4.5% difference between Republicans and Democrats is no difference at all, based on margin of error. Until you can produce this margin of error to corroborate your theory, I think the burden's on you.

http://depts.washington.edu/uw...

The margin of error in the study was 4.4%.

Back to you, Ron.

The link is good. I scanned the report -- did you?

From Page 7, Data and Methods:

This survey is the fourth in a series of voter surveys we have conducted, and the research methodology is well proven. In previous research, we found a strong correlation between the lack of access to valid photo identification and racial minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and low-income populations in Washington state, California and New Mexico (Barreto, Nuño and Sanchez 2007).

Page 8:

In full, 1,000 interviews were collected among registered voters with a margin of error of 3.1 percent, and 500 interviews among non-registered adults with a margin of error of 4.4 percent.

PP. 10-11:

Next, a significant gap in access to valid ID exists among White and Black registered voters, which is even more pronounced among the overall adult population in
Indiana. Among those already registered to vote, looking to column 4, the closest approximation to the current Indiana law, a 6-point gap exists in access to valid photo ID with 84.2% of White registered voters reporting proper ID, compared to 78.2% of Black registered voters. Table 1.2 reports similar data for the overall adult eligible population, by way of merging the non-registered voter data with the registered voter data7. Here we note a gap of 11.5 points with 83.2% of all Whites in Indiana reporting access to valid photo identification, compared to 71.7% of Blacks statewide.

Both of these differences between percentage of white and black populations with current IDs (approximating current Indiana law) fall outside the margin of error -- 6% access difference versus 3.1% MoE for registered voters; 11.5% access differences versus approx. 5% MoE for all voters.

So, the data appear to prove rather conclusively that this law results in unequal access to the polls for various groups that tend to vote Democratic. And again, there was not one provable instance of voter fraud that the state of Indiana could produce. This is an equal protection problem plain and simple, as there is no compelling state interest to ameliorate a non-existent problem when the side-effects are a shrinking of the franchise for certain protected classes.  

And, IMHO, it is full of non sequiturs and contrivances.  However, my opinion doesn't matter.  The Supreme Court also read it and in a vote of 6-3 found it uncompelling.  The Supreme Court trumps a bunch of college professors, whether you agree with them or not.  It is the law of the land.  

The Court has ruled, and, for now, that's the law. There are democratic methods to eliminate or reduce the impact of the court's decision, but until then the law is valid.

The voters in Indiana can decide what to do, or federal legislation can be contemplated and passed (under the powers granted to Congress under the 14th amendment to ensure full citizenship rights) and enacted that voids this law. Those are currently our options. I am for either.  

Also, as pointed out earlier on this thread, Indiana provides free photo IDs.  So where is the poll tax?

Is that it's difficult to get a photo ID. It's not, and it's required for most services anyways that these people you're talking about do. If you want to argue that the cost of gas it takes to drive to a location to receive a government-issued photo ID is the equivolent of a poll tax, then I don't know what to tell you.

Since the state of Indiana provides, for free, ID cards with absolutely no discrimination of any sort, there is no legitimate claim to a breach of the 14th Amendment.

The entire basis of my argument for the unconstitutionality of the law is the fact that blacks, the elderly, and the disabled are disproportionately affected. You can throw around the excuses all you want about how there may be no intended discrimination, but the end result is that, here in the real world, blacks and the elderly and the poor and the disabled will have reduced access to voting.

I would argue that, under an honest court (see Ginsburg's dissent), this law would NEVER live up to a strict scrutiny analysis because it does, in fact, discriminate against certain suspect classes. This is the heart of 14th amendment equal protection jurisprudence, and this law prima facie fails to live up to it.

I'll even admit that my argument based on the 24th Amendment is more tenuous, but it's the combination of the intent of the 14th, 15h, and 24th amendments and the structure implied by these amendments that would lead an honest broker to realize that this law ends up disproportionately affecting certain groups (that, oh by the way, happen to be majority Democrat) without any compelling state interest. If there were provable instances of voter fraud at a rate high enough that it would throw into question the legitimacy of our elections, that would be one thing. But there is no such proof, not even close. Right wing paranoia and urban legend is not a compelling state interest to discriminate against voting.  

the mindset of those who are opposed to this decision that a known and preventable problem must be widespread before legislation can be enacted to prevent it. There is a ton of compelling state interest to ensure the legitimacy of all of it's election. The fact that there is not an epidemic of voter fraud in Indiana currently doesn't decrease, in the slightest, that interest for the state.

As far as "reduced access to voting", I will concede that the law requires these demographics that you mention to take action that they may not normally (that is, going to a location to receive a free photo ID). I don't see a coherent argument that centers around a section of the population that apparently is motivated just enough to go out and vote, but is not motivated to go out and get a free government-issued ID, which, by the way, is necessary for doing a whole host of other daily functions as well.

Moreover, there is no discrimination claim here, because all anybody has to do is go to a location and receive their ID, which they have ample time to do, and if they don't bring it on the day they vote, they can cast a provisional ballot (so no one is turned away at the polls), then they have a week to provide a photo ID. You're trying to argue discrimination by putting "hurdles" in front of voting, but those hurdles are easily overcome, so the only people that are discriminated against are the ones that don't have the motivation to receive a government-issued ID.

Use it as a grassroots organization incentive to find and help voters who might be disenfranchised by this ruling.

Show them that we will not be bullied out of the right to vote.

DNC / Hillary / Obama  - 100+ million dollar campaign and most will go back to the MSM in ad revenue.

Spend some $$$ on organization and finding those voters that this might impact.  Plus start urging grassroots and activist to be part of the election boards, work @ the polls as a election official.  It is just as important to have knowledgeable people on the inside to stop disenfranchisement as it is on the outside handing out sample ballots!

Democrats across the country need to start ensuring that there are knowledgeable poeple working on the inside of polls come November.  

In so may instances in 2004 (Ohio comes to mind) volunteer poll workers had no clue how to work electronic voting machines and this is a huge problem in most urban areas which the Dems carry by huge margins.  So many of these poll workers are elderly women who are not tech saavy and the training they are given is inadequate in a lot of instances.

And money has to be spent this fall on organization, door knocking, etc., to communicate with our voters to ensure they have everything they need when they vote.  And in instances like in Indiana, they need to understand they can cast a provisional ballot in the event the do not have an ID at the time.