Democracy for Vancouver

and not black boxes that can be hacked but not audited, right?

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana’s strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud.
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The law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,’” Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy. Stevens was a dissenter in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented, just as they did in 2000.
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The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

There is little history in Indiana of either in-person voter fraud — of the sort the law was designed to thwart — or voters being inconvenienced by the law’s requirements. For the overwhelming majority of voters, an Indiana driver license serves as the identification.

“We cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters,” Stevens said.

Stevens’ opinion suggests that the outcome could be different in a state where voters could provide evidence that their rights had been impaired.

But in dissent, Souter said Indiana’s voter ID law “threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens.”

The GOP was smart to press this first in Indiana, a relatively homogenous state with no recent history of voter lockouts like Florida or Ohio.

They get this one on the books, albeit with dicta* from Stevens that “if [political] considerations had provided the only justification for a photo identification requirement, we may assume” that the law “would suffer the same fate as the poll tax.” So future courts might make different decisions based on the facts.

But Scalia’s own dicta kills any hope of that - at least with this court:

The lead opinion assumes petitioners’ premise that the voter-identification law ‘may have imposed a special burden on’ some voters, but holds that petitioners have not assembled evidence to show that the special burden is severe enough to warrant strict scrutiny. That is true enough, but for the sake of clarity and finality as well as adherence to precedent, I prefer to decide these cases on the grounds that petitioners’ premise is irrelevant and that the burden at issue is minimal and justified.

So, for states with sizable populations of folks too old to drive or too poor to own a car, but with sufficient Republicans in the legislature to push such a law through, the first Court-sanctioned poll tax since Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections is theirs to exploit.

Welcome back to 1965, everybody. Too bad Selma Sheriff Jim Clark didn’t live to see it.

*dicta: The part of a judicial opinion which is merely a judge’s editorializing and does not directly address the specifics of the case at bar; extraneous material which is merely informative or explanatory; not binding on future decisions.