High court upholds voter ID law

By Michael Sewall

Published April 29, 2008

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday to uphold an Indiana voter identification law with a 6-3 vote.

The law, which requires voters to present photo identification at the polling place, features support split mostly along party lines. While Republicans mostly support the law, saying it would prevent voter fraud, Democrats say it could keep certain voters from casting ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court decided preventing voter fraud is a reasonable purpose for the law.

“Indiana has a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said in the written opinion.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy joined Stevens in writing the opinion. Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome Monday, but wrote a separate opinion in favor of voter ID laws.

“The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable,” Scalia said in the opinion. “The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting,” Scalia said.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented. Souter said in the opinion the voter ID law threatens to impose “nontrivial burdens” on many of the state’s citizens, including the poor and old. Matthew Segal, founder of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, said voter ID laws that require a photo ID could affect students poorly. He said changing residency is not something most students want to do.

“Unless students are to change their out-of-state driver’s licenses or residency entirely, many young voters will be forced to vote absentee or provisionally, lowering voter efficacy and making the registration process more bureaucratic, time-consuming and cumbersome,” Segal said. “Changing state residency can also create complications for out-of-state students on certain scholarship guidelines or financial aid contracts.”

The Indiana law passed in 2005 and was in effect for the 2006 elections. The Missouri General Assembly passed a similar law in 2006, but the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the law prior to the election that year. MU law professor Richard Reuben said Monday’s decision should not revive the Missouri law stricken in 2006.

“The Missouri Supreme Court relied on the state, not the federal, constitution in reaching its decision,” Reuben said in a news release. “While the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision will have less of an impact in Missouri, the decision will be important in many other states.”

In a statement, House Minority Leader Paul LeVota, D-Independence, said the ruling would have “little impact” on Missouri.

“In invalidating the Missouri law, the state Supreme Court said the Missouri Constitution unequivocally guarantees the right of all legally registered Missouri voters to cast ballots and that the General Assembly may not impose additional requirements, such as photo ID, that aren’t specified in the state constitution,” LeVota said in the statement.

LeVota said in the statement any effort to bring back a voter ID law in Missouri would be unnecessary.

“Efforts to impose photo voter ID in this state remain nothing more than an attempt to disenfranchise certain Missourians under the guise of solving a nonexistent problem,” he said.

Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling does not apply to Missouri at all because of the state court’s ruling in 2006. She said she does not think there will be a photo ID requirement in Missouri in the November elections.

“For there to be a photo ID law this year, they would have to adopt a constitutional amendment,” Noren said. “But you can’t say today what we’re going to have in November until the legislature adjourns.”