Supreme Court to weigh in on state’s voter ID law

Other states have similar laws.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

WASHINGTON — The issue the Supreme Court will hear today is clear-cut, and the impact of its ultimate decision on the American electorate is potentially enormous.

The question is whether Indiana’s law requiring voters to show a photo ID at a polling place in order to vote is constitutional. Opponents of the law claim that the requirement will result in scores of elderly, poor and minority voters being turned away from the polls. Its supporters say the measure is necessary to combat voter fraud. Both sides say the other’s position favors rhetoric over the record, that few hard facts underlie their claims.

Indiana’s law is considered the strictest in the nation. But such other states as Georgia, Missouri and Arizona have enacted similar laws, and a court decision giving them a go-ahead could invite more states and counties to do the same, potentially in time for the 2008 general election. In Indiana, “if you don’t have a current driver’s license or a passport, you’ve got a lot of problems voting,” said Tova Wang, an election-law expert at the Century Foundation, a public policy group.

The laws’ critics say that 10 percent to 12 percent of voting-age Americans don’t have driver’s licenses and that as many as 21 million voters could be disenfranchised by such requirements. But former Federal Election Commission chair Bradley Smith believes that estimate is wildly inflated. “It’s absurd to argue that 21 million Americans are going to be disenfranchised by these laws,” Smith said.

The debate is largely drawn along partisan lines. Democrats, with a larger base of poor, elderly and minority voters, oppose such laws. Claims of disenfranchisement, particularly of black voters, were at the heart of the presidential election dispute in 2000 that eventually was brokered by the Supreme Court.

Republicans have made combating voter fraud a priority in recent years. Indeed, it was a push by the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to bring more voter fraud cases that was reportedly at the heart of last year’s imbroglio over nine fired U.S. attorneys.

“Requiring photo identification at the polling place is not a Republican scheme to drive down voter turnout,” the Republican National Committee said in a brief filed with the court. The RNC argued that the requirement may actually increase turnout, because voters will have more confidence in the integrity of the voting process, and it notes that a majority of Americans favor some sort of identification requirement.