In This Article
30-Second Summary
Headline Links: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board
Background: Background on Indiana ID Law; similar cases; plurality opinions
Reactions: Speaker Pelosi and the ACLU
Opinion & Analysis: The ruling and its aftermath
Related Topics: ‘States Consider Resumption of Death Penalty After Supreme Court Decision’
Reference: Court opinion and the Supreme Court Web Guide
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Supreme Court Approves Voter ID Law
April 29, 2008 09:30 AM
by
findingDulcinea Staff
by Matthew R. Bald
As Indiana prepares for its May 6 presidential primaries, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a state law requiring voters to present photo identification.
As Indiana prepares for its May 6 presidential primaries, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a state law requiring voters to present photo identification.
30-Second Summary
In what The Washington Post calls “the most sharply partisan case the court has considered since its ruling in Bush v. Gore,” the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Indiana’s voter identification law is not unconstitutional.
Proponents of the 2005 Republican-drafted legislation—Balkinization blog points out that “all of the Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly supported the bill, while all of the Democrats opposed it”—say it prevents voter fraud.
The law’s critics argue that it disenfranchises voters who are least likely to have driver’s licenses or passports and traditionally vote Democrat, such as minorities, urbanites, the poor, the disabled and the elderly.
But the Democrats who challenged the law, Slate legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick told NPR, “just didn’t adduce enough proof.”
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board “was brought as a ‘facial’ challenge, which is a constitutional challenge that says under every set of facts this law is unconstitutional,” said Lithwick. “That is an extraordinarily high bar to meet.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the court’s decision “disappointing,” and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Indiana Legal Director Ken Falk said the judgment “minimizes the very real burden that Indiana's voter ID law places on tens of thousands of eligible voters.”
Lyle Denniston of SCOTUS Blog agrees, writing that the ruling “may turn out to be a significant victory for Republicans at election time.”
Although the court’s decision will likely apply to states with similar voter ID requirements—more than 20 in all—Election Law Blog writes that it will also “encourage further litigation.”
Proponents of the 2005 Republican-drafted legislation—Balkinization blog points out that “all of the Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly supported the bill, while all of the Democrats opposed it”—say it prevents voter fraud.
The law’s critics argue that it disenfranchises voters who are least likely to have driver’s licenses or passports and traditionally vote Democrat, such as minorities, urbanites, the poor, the disabled and the elderly.
But the Democrats who challenged the law, Slate legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick told NPR, “just didn’t adduce enough proof.”
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board “was brought as a ‘facial’ challenge, which is a constitutional challenge that says under every set of facts this law is unconstitutional,” said Lithwick. “That is an extraordinarily high bar to meet.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the court’s decision “disappointing,” and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Indiana Legal Director Ken Falk said the judgment “minimizes the very real burden that Indiana's voter ID law places on tens of thousands of eligible voters.”
Lyle Denniston of SCOTUS Blog agrees, writing that the ruling “may turn out to be a significant victory for Republicans at election time.”
Although the court’s decision will likely apply to states with similar voter ID requirements—more than 20 in all—Election Law Blog writes that it will also “encourage further litigation.”
Headline Links: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board
The Washington Post reports that, because Indiana’s voter identification law “is generally regarded as the nation's strictest, the ruling bodes well for other states that have required photo ID.” The Post also points out that “states with Republican-majority legislatures are pushing similar laws, saying they are a necessary and common-sense way to combat voter fraud and are widely supported by the public.”
Source: The Washington Post (registration may be required)
The Supreme Court’s Web site provides a transcript of the oral arguments in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board as a PDF file.
Source: The Web site of the U.S. Supreme Court [PDF]
Background: Background on Indiana ID Law; similar cases; plurality opinions
Cornell University Law School provides a backgrounder on the Indiana voter ID law. According to the document, the question presented in the case was whether “an Indiana statute mandating that those seeking to vote in-person produce a government-issued photo identification violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”
Source: Cornell University Law School
In October 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona could enforce its voter ID law. Although similar laws have also been upheld in Georgia and Michigan, one in Missouri was struck down. “Currently, more than 20 states require some form of voter identification at the polls,” reports legal news Web site Jurist.
Source: Jurist
Professor Pamela C. Corey of Vanderbilt University Law School explains, in a paper presented to the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, that a plurality opinion is "one in which a majority of the justices concur in the result but not in the reasoning." The prediction of continuing litigation of Voter ID cases may be predicated on the traditional scholarly notion that plurality decisions "do more to confuse the current state of the law than to clarify it." However, although further litigation over such a polarizing issue may be inevitable, Professor Corey reviewed how Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals treated Supreme Court cases from the 1986 term over the ensuing 17 years, and found that "plurality opinions are no different than majority opinions when it comes to treatment by the lower courts."
Source: "Lower Court Responses to Supreme Court Plurality Opinions" [PDF]
Reactions: Speaker Pelosi and the ACLU
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement the court’s “decision is disappointing.” She goes on to say that the ruling “places obstacles to the fundamental rights of American citizens—especially the poor, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities—to participate in the electoral process. Requiring American citizens pay for underlying documents needed for an identification card and travel to distant motor vehicle locations for processing hinders—and diminishes—their right to vote.”
Source: Breitbart.com
Ken Falk, ACLU Indiana Legal Director and lead counsel on the case, said, “Today's decision minimizes the very real burden that Indiana's voter ID law places on tens of thousands of eligible voters who lack a government-issued identification while accepting at face value Indiana's unsubstantiated claim of voter fraud.”
Source: The American Civil Liberties Union
Opinion & Analysis: The ruling and its aftermath
Slate legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick told NPR that Democrats “just didn’t adduce enough proof to get Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the court’s really reliably liberal members, to vote along with them. … This was brought as a ‘facial’ challenge, which is a constitutional challenge that says under every set of facts this law is unconstitutional. That bar is extraordinarily high bar to meet.”
Source: NPR
Election Law Blog writes that the ruling “will encourage further litigation, because it relegates challenges to laws imposing onerous burdens on a small group of voters to ‘as applied’ challenges, but those challenges will be difficult to win. The lack of a majority opinion, moreover, injects some uncertainty into the appropriate standard for reviewing other challenges.”
Source: Election Law Blog
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS Blog writes that the court’s decision “may turn out to be a significant victory for Republicans at election time, since the requirement for proof of identification is likely to fall most heavily on voters long assumed to be identified with the Democrats. The GOP for years has been actively pursuing a campaign against what it calls ‘voter fraud,’ and the Court’s ruling Monday appears to validate that effort, at least in part.”
Source: SCOTUS Blog
Jack Balkin at the Balkinization blog disagrees with the decision, writing that the fact that “all of the Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly supported the bill, while all of the Democrats opposed it … speaks volumes about the purposes behind the legislation. … One of the most famous ideas in constitutional law is the idea taken from the Carolene Products decision: courts should closely scrutinize laws when government officials try to skew the rules of political competition to keep their party in power. It's hard to get better evidence of a concerted attempt to fix the voting rules on behalf of a particular party than in this case.”
Source: Balkinization
Related Topics: ‘States Consider Resumption of Death Penalty After Supreme Court Decision’
On April 16, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the use of lethal injections in Kentucky. Most states had halted executions pending the outcome of the case.
Source: findingDulcinea
Reference: Court opinion and the Supreme Court Web Guide
SCOTUS blog provides a copy of the Supreme Court’s opinion as a PDF. Justice Stevens announced the court’s judgment, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Justice Antonin Scalia filed a concurring opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. Justice David H. Souter filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Stephen G. Breyer also filed a dissenting opinion.
Source: SCOTUS Blog [PDF]
FindingDulcinea’s Supreme Court Web Guide offers the best online resources for staying informed up to date with the highest court in the land.
Source: findingDulcinea
© 2010 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
