I'm yay-deep in climate change today, but it just came across the wire that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether or not voter-identification laws in some states are unfairly preventing poor people (and in most areas, the most affected groups are minorities) from going to the polls. Cases in several states have raised the question of whether laws that require a government-issued identification card to vote are inherently discriminatory, as a certain sector of the population lacks the means to pay for this form of identification and is therefore being denied the right to vote. The case they'll hear is out of Indiana, where a federal district judge and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a state voting law in January. The new law that requires ID replaces an older law that only required voters to sign in, and poll workers could verify the signatures against those on record.
Republicans tend to favor the laws in order to prevent voter fraud, while Democrats argue that they affect a segment of the population that usually votes for Democratic candidates. No one in Indiana has ever been prosecuted for voter fraud, which dissenting judge Terence T. Evans pointed to as evidence that the claim that ID laws combat fraud doesn't hold water. Writing as the lone dissenting opinion on the panel, he concluded: "Let’s not beat around the bush. 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."
With the current Supreme Court, this could be a tough one to for those who oppose the ID laws to win. It might even be easier to make a basic, government-issued ID free for everyone. More and more public high schools are issuing plastic photo ID cards to all students for a variety of safety reasons free of charge, and those things can be produced on-site in minutes. And the county I'm registered to vote in sends all voters a little manila card with their voter identification information typed (on a typewriter, no less – how's that for inefficient) on it, also free of charge. Maybe this is absurd, but can't we just pool resources and issue a photo-ID to everyone who registers to vote?
--Kate Sheppard
