The mission of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is to restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.
Opinion: Taking sides on voter ID
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 01/13/2007 - 8:45pm.
January 10, 2007
By Dan Carpenter, Indianapolis Star
The judge had it right when he said Indiana's voter ID law is fundamentally wrong.
Alas, his opinion and a buck fifty will get the challengers of that law a cup of gourmet coffee and an alternative newspaper to read their story in.
Not only was Judge Terrence Evans of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in the minority in voting to grant the appeal of the trial court's blessing of the law. He also had a legal problem in the strict technical sense, as do the plaintiffs should they decide to continue their quest.
Simply (if not simplistically) put, proving a law unconstitutional, even as applied to millions of Americans, requires identifying specific individuals who have been injured or placed in imminent danger of such.
As the majority of the appeals court asserted, and as District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker had so acidulously declared before them, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Democratic Party failed to produce a Joe or Jane Citizen who tried to vote last November and deserved to vote and was turned away or otherwise frustrated.
It's kind of like asking the Republicans, whose idea voter ID is, to prove the existence of the ballot fraud that they claim to be seeking to prevent. They can't. Theirs is a solution in search of a problem, just as they maintain the lawsuit against their scheme to complicate the voting process is.
The difference? The Republicans waged their campaign in the political, rather than legal, arena. They had the votes. The opponents came close to having the votes from the appeals court -- it was 2 to 1 -- but even the guy who agreed with them didn't offer much to carry to a conservative Supreme Court.
Arguing that the law pits "hollow" necessity against great potential harm to disadvantaged Hoosiers, Judge Evans urged placing the burden on the state under the principle of "strict scrutiny" -- or at least "strict scrutiny light." Clearly, he would like to have been more help.
"Let's not beat around the bush," Evans wrote. "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."
Secretary of State Todd Rokita and his fellow Republicans may clutch their hearts and gape in wounded bewilderment at such a suggestion, but anybody who truly thinks otherwise must have, as my dad used to put it, just fallen off a load of melons.
The problem for Democrats and activists for civil liberties is proving a negative. Marginalized people -- the poor, the non-affluent elderly, the disabled, the newly naturalized with language difficulty, the many who have had negative encounters with the system -- tend to vote for Democrats when they vote and tend to announce to nobody when they elect not to try to negotiate the barriers between them and the polls. State-issued ID cards are one giant leap for them and one small step for the middle class, which may not rise to the level of unconstitutional discrimination but certainly will serve a nefarious partisan purpose. If you found some of them, Judge Barker and her affirmers would say nobody exactly confronted them at the polls with a literacy test. They could have bucked up and voted.
OK. Let's restrict voting to the truly worthy. Now there's a slippery slope. All we've done so far is make Indiana the most difficult place in the Union to exercise the right of franchise. One faction of our divided community wants it and all of us are losers for it. I don't need a lawyer to explain that.
Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or at dan.carpenter@indystar.com.
VIDEO: “Protecting Your Vote”
