On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law that requires all voters to present an in-state driver's license or other official photo ID featuring their current address. Chris Rabb writes at Afro-Netizen:
On the surface, it seems like a pretty reasonable ruling: folks need to prove who they are when they go to vote to avoid potential voter fraud. The reality is that what is reasonable for many white collar and blue collar voters is not so reasonable for those invisible Americans who have not earned that amorphous moniker of "middle class".
These invisible souls are our country's poorest citizens who do not travel internationally (and thus, do no have passports) and who often cannot afford to own cars, the insurance on them or the gas in them (and thus, are far less likely to have a driver's license).
Indeed. And as Ben Adler reports at Politico, the ruling also hurts voters under 30, about 19 percent of whom do not have a photo ID listing their current address. That number spikes considerably among young people of color; in one Wisconsin survey, "nearly three-quarters of African Americans and fully two-thirds of Hispanics aged 18 to 24 did not have a valid driver’s license."
With Indiana's primary in less than a week, the Court has guaranteed that many young adults there will be rendered ineligible to vote. Another late-breaking development that hurts Barack Obama. Elsewhere on TAPPED Scott has more.
--Dana Goldstein
