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The Indiana Court of Appeals struck down the Voter ID Act that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court last year. The opinion gets right to the heart of the issue:
All qualified voters must be treated uniformly and impartially. We fail to see how the Voter I.D. Law's exception of those residing in state licensed care facilities, which happen to also be a polling place, would be a uniform or impartial regulation. Furthermore, the Voter I.D. Law treats in-person voters disparate from mail-in voters, conferring partial treatment upon mail-in voters.The disparate treatment of mail-in and ballot-box voters is particularly indefensible given 1) the obvious political self-dealing (absentee voters are predominantly Republican, voters without IDs primarily Democratic) and 2) the fact that the few cited examples of vote fraud involved absentee ballots, not in-person voting. So it's not just that the rights of a discrete and insular minority are burdened in ways that benefit the partisan interests of the majority party. There's also the problem that this was done with a law is farcically under-inclusive given the state's asserted justification. So what you have here is an equal protection/privileges and immunities violation. Good for the Indiana courts for doing what the Supreme Court shamefully wouldn't.--Scott Lemieux
