Last week, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana state law requiring all voters to present a government-issued photo ID such as a driver's license or a passport before they can be allowed to cast a ballot. The stated rationale behind the law, which was pushed through the state legislature by the Republican Party, was the prevention of voter fraud where someone shows up at a polling place claiming to be someone else.
Of course, the Court didn't care that this has literally never happened in Indiana. As Justice Stephen Breyer somewhat tartly observed in his dissent, "the State has not come across a single instance of in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Indiana's history. Neither the District Court nor the Indiana General Assembly that passed the Voter ID Law was given any evidence whatsoever of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the State."
Even though the majority opinion agreed there were no substantiated cases of voter fraud in Indiana which would be deterred by the law, it was upheld anyway.
And now we're seeing the results. While trying to vote today in Indiana's primary election, a group of women from South Bend could not present the required form of ID and were thus turned away.
The women were all nuns in their 80s and 90s, none of whom drive.
Not only were elderly nuns prevented from voting, but a new bride was turned away because the name on her driver's license didn't match the one on her voter registration record, a college student was rejected because she had only a school ID card and an out-of-state driver's license, and so on.
Ratified in 1964, the 24th Amendment finally outlawed the poll tax that was used to prevent generations of blacks and poor Americans from voting. With the Court's action, a new, back-door poll tax - the cost of obtaining a driver's license or other official photo ID - has been declared entirely legal.
In upholding the Indiana law, the Supreme Court blithely said that "petitioners' premise that the voter-identification law might have imposed a special burden on some voters is irrelevant. The law should be upheld because its overall burden is minimal and justified." Of course, citizens who don't have driver's licenses are overwhelmingly likely to be poor, elderly, urban residents or young people - all reliably Democratic constituencies.
But holding down the Democratic vote by wholesale disenfranchisement wasn't the purpose of the law, right?
Right?
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