US Supreme Court considers voter ID rules
WASHINGTON (AFP) — In a case that could roil the US presidential race, the US Supreme Court will consider whether requiring voters to provide identification to cast a ballot is constitutional.
Traditionally, US polling station monitors could simply check to see that a voter's "fresh" signature was the same as the one on record on the books, to keep one person from casting another's ballot.
But in an updating of rules and procedures following the 2000 presidential vote fiasco, more than half of the 50 US states passed laws requiring voters to present one form of identification to cast ballots -- an unusually sensitive issue in a country where there is no national ID card.
In most cases, a library card would do the trick.
But in Indiana and a handful of other states, it is necessary to present a form of identification issued by a government agency, such as a passport, driver's license or military ID.
In Indiana, about 43,000 of the 4.7 million residents of voting age (over 18) have neither a passport nor a driver's license. Most of them are elderly, belong to minorities and live in relatively poor areas. As many of these same social subsets tend to lean toward the Democratic Party, the debate has taken on a hotly political edge.
Critics argue that Indiana's law, passed in 2005, keeps some citizens from exercising their right to vote. And unjustly so, they say, because no one in Indiana has been prosecuted for voting in another's place. Others say fraud balloons electoral lists and irregularities in absentee-ballot or mail-in voting.
Democrats and other minority-based civil rights groups are among those who have taken on the Indiana law.
Still, the law was upheld in court, and again on appeal. Judges stressed what they said was the plaintiffs' failure to cite a single example of a person who was kept from voting.
Among the nuances: no identification is needed for a mail-in ballot.
And a ballot cast on voting day can be counted if, within 10 days, the voter either presents one form of ID; or signs a document saying he is either too poor to get one, or refuses for religious reasons to have his or her picture taken.
In local elections two months ago in Marion County, Indiana, 34 of these provisional ballots were cast but 32 of the voters involved -- most of whom always voted at the same office -- did not return to present their identification documents.
But none of these 32 were among the plaintiffs.
The US high court, which is expected to make its decision by July, could send the issue back to lower courts for now, leaving the Indiana law and others like it, in effect for the coming November presidential election.
"Despite the anti-fraud talk," the New York Times opined on Wednesday, "the inescapable conclusion is that the laws are an attempt to shave a few percentage points off of a Democratic turnout.
"The justices can strike a blow for their own reputation and for democracy by standing up for an obvious principle: that the right to vote cannot be taken away to serve the electoral purposes of a political party," the newspaper editorial read.
For the American Civil Liberties Union, this marked "the most important voting rights case since Bush v. Gore settled the 2000 presidential election."
Said Ken Falk, Legal Director of the ACLU of Indiana and lead counsel on the case: "Onerous voter ID laws like Indiana's do not prevent fraud -- they create excessive burdens on voting rights without any justification whatsoever. It is our hope that the Supreme Court will reject the deceptive voter fraud myth by strongly reaffirming the right to vote in this country."
