by Nina Totenberg - NPR - January 9, 2008
Morning Edition, January 9, 2008 · Politics is front and center at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, as the justices examine the constitutionality of laws requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID in order to cast a ballot. Although 24 states have enacted such laws in recent years, Democrats contend that they suppress voter turnout.
Since the fateful 2000 election, Republicans in many states have pushed for voter ID laws to stave off what they see as a major problem: voter fraud through voter impersonation at the polls. But studies have shown the problem does not exist.
Tova Wang, a Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation, co-authored research and filed a federally mandated report on the question.
"We found that although there is fraud in the system, it doesn't take place at the polling place," Wang says.
Royal Masset, a consultant who by his own estimate has been involved in some 5,000 Republican campaigns in Texas, agrees.
"My experience is that in-person voter fraud is nonexistent," he says. "It doesn't happen, and if you really analyze it, it makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"
Voter fraud does exist, say the experts, but in more systematic ways, through ballot box stuffing, voter machine manipulation, registration list manipulation and absentee balloting.
Documents Required to Vote
Still, 24 states have passed some sort of voter ID law. Indiana's is the strictest: It requires anyone voting in person to present a current government photo ID.
If you don't have one, you can vote provisionally at the polls, but you must present the required ID at an appropriate government office within 10 days or your vote will not be counted. People who don't have IDs can get them free from the state, but they must have appropriate documents, such as a certified birth certificate, and other secondary proof.
The Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union went to court seeking to block the law, noting that there is not a single recorded case of voter-impersonation fraud in Indiana's history. A federal appeals court acknowledged that the law poses a heavier burden on groups that tend to vote Democratic — minorities, the poor and the elderly. But, the court said, the burden is slight.
'A Preventative Approach'
In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Indiana will argue that the law is necessary to promote public confidence in the system.
"There is concern about fraud in the future, so it's a preventative approach that hopefully can maintain the integrity of the voting process," Indiana Attorney General Steven Carter says.
Countering that argument will be lawyer Paul Smith.
"Under the Supreme Court's doctrine, the fundamental right to vote is protected from laws which look like legitimate regulations but don't actually serve any purpose while imposing significant burdens," Smith says.
The devil, Smith contends, is in the details of Indiana's law. He cites, for example, the case of a woman who made three trips to the motor vehicle bureau in a vain attempt to get a free voter ID card. Her problem, even after she obtained her birth certificate, was that it was not in her married name. While the state does provide free voter ID cards, Smith observes, voters incur considerable costs in time and money to secure the documents the state requires as a condition for getting the cards.
'I Should Be Able to Have a Voice'
The League of Women Voters has filed a brief with concrete examples. One of those examples is the case of Kim Tillman of Indianapolis, a stay-at-home wife of a janitor and mother of seven children ages 1 to 11. In order to get the free voter ID card, she had to get her birth certificate from out of state, a process that she said would have cost as much as $50. And that was money she needed for household bills. Not being able to vote, she says, made her feel like she wasn't a citizen.
"I believe that I should be able to have a voice ... to say who I would like governing the state that I live in," Tillman says. "But unfortunately because of the state laws I'm unable to do that."
The state contends that Tillman could have voted if she had gone to the state offices within the 29 days before an election and sworn out an affidavit saying she is indigent, a process she would have to repeat before each election. There is no indigency affidavit provided on Election Day at the polls.
In the most recent mayoral election in Indianapolis, the city documented 34 cases of voters who had voted repeatedly and consistently in past years and whose signatures matched their registrations, but who had to cast provisional votes because they did not have the proper ID. Only two of those 34 voters went back within the required 10-day period after the election with the appropriate ID so their votes would be counted.
Carter, the state attorney general, notes that 34 voters out of 160,000 isn't that many.
"So those who didn't have the proper photo identification was really a miniscule number in this urban county," Carter says.
Voting rights lawyers counter that there were likely many more who just turned around and went home instead of taking the time to vote provisionally. In any event, they contend, even 34 votes, when duplicated in other locations throughout the state, can add up to hundreds, even thousands of votes that could decide a closely contested election.
Continued on NPR
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Justices Indicate They May Uphold Voter ID Rules
By LINDA GREENHOUSE - The New York Times - January 10, 2008
WASHINGTON — There are many ways to lose a Supreme Court case, and by the end of an argument that was before the court on Wednesday, the Democrats who were challenging Indiana’s voter-identification law appeared poised to lose theirs in a potentially sweeping way, with implications for many future election cases.
The justices’ questioning indicated that a majority did not accept the challengers’ basic argument — that voter-impersonation fraud is not a problem, so requiring voters to produce government-issued photo identification at the polls is an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
The tenor of the argument suggested, however, that rather than simply decide the case in favor of the state, a majority of five justices would go further and rule that the challenge to the statute, the strictest voter-identification law in the country, was improperly brought in the first place. Such a ruling could make it much more difficult to challenge any new state election regulations before they go into effect.
The Indiana Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the 2005 law before it went into effect, seeking a declaration that it was unconstitutional on its face and could not be enforced even against the majority of Indiana voters who could easily produce the required photo ID. Such an approach, known as a “facial challenge,” is the standard way of attacking election regulations like the poll taxes that the Supreme Court struck down in the 1960s and more recent redistricting and ballot-access cases.
But the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has displayed deep skepticism toward such challenges, most notably on the subject of abortion, on the grounds that they require courts to step outside a limited role of resolving concrete disputes brought by parties with actual injuries.
“You seem to accept that a facial challenge is appropriate here,” Justice Antonin Scalia said with evident disapproval to Thomas M. Fisher, the Indiana solicitor general, who was defending a lower court’s judgment that the law was constitutional.
Indiana, in fact, had not objected to the form in which the case was brought. That argument was introduced by the Bush administration, which entered the case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, No. 07-21, after the Supreme Court agreed in September to hear it. In the administration’s brief, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement urged the justices to uphold “principles of judicial restraint” by rejecting the facial challenge.
Joining Mr. Fisher in arguing for the state on Wednesday, Mr. Clement said the court should wait for a case to be brought by someone who was actually barred by the statute from casting a ballot. Such a lawsuit “could focus like a laser beam” on particular problems, Mr. Clement said, adding that if such a case were successful, it would have the virtue of producing a remedy that solved the problem without invalidating the entire law.
Justice David H. Souter countered, “That would be a virtue, but one of the vices would be that it would be after the election, and the entire matter would be academic for another two years.”
Justice Ginsburg’s subtle but unmistakable allusion was to the partisan context in which voter identification laws, recently adopted by a handful of Republican-dominated states, are being debated. Democrats charge that the true purpose of the laws is to deter participation by some predictably Democratic voters, particularly poor people and members of minority groups who are less likely than others to have driver’s licenses or passports.
The Bush administration has raised the suspicions of Democrats by making what they call “voter fraud” a priority for Justice Department enforcement. No prosecution for impersonating a registered voter, the type of fraud that would be prevented by a photo requirement, has ever been brought, however.
“No one has been punished for this kind of fraud in living memory in this country,” Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer arguing for the Democrats, told the justices.
In his opinion last year upholding the Indiana law, Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit agreed with the Democratic plaintiffs that the law would fall more heavily on Democrats than on Republicans. But that did not make the statute unconstitutional, he said.
On Wednesday, discussion of the law’s justification, and of the extent of the burden it placed on voters, was inconclusive. Mr. Fisher, Indiana’s lawyer, said that because photo identification was “necessary to do so many everyday activities,” the number of those affected was “infinitesimal.” Mr. Smith said the number was more likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Under the Indiana law, voters who are turned away for lack of identification may cast provisional ballots, which are counted only if the voter travels to the county clerk’s office within 10 days to show the required identification or sign a sworn statement that he cannot afford to obtain such an identification. The plaintiffs have argued that this extra step and required travel create an unnecessary burden that other states with identification requirements do not impose; those states do not require voters to make a second trip in order to have a provisional counted.
Chief Justice Roberts, who grew up in Indiana, did not seem to find the burden excessive. “County seats aren’t very far for people in Indiana,” he said.
Mr. Smith replied that the county seat in Lake County was a 17-mile bus ride from the county’s urban center of Gary. “If you’re indigent, that’s a significant burden,” he said. The chief justice also seemed unimpressed by the absence of known voter impersonators. “It’s a type of fraud that, because it’s fraud, it’s hard to detect,” he said to Mr. Smith.
Justice Scalia interrupted the debate over the law’s impact in order to frame his argument against facial challenges.
“I should hope not,” the Indiana solicitor general replied.
Read more in the New York Times
WASHINGTON — There are many ways to lose a Supreme Court case, and by the end of an argument that was before the court on Wednesday, the Democrats who were challenging Indiana’s voter-identification law appeared poised to lose theirs in a potentially sweeping way, with implications for many future election cases.
The justices’ questioning indicated that a majority did not accept the challengers’ basic argument — that voter-impersonation fraud is not a problem, so requiring voters to produce government-issued photo identification at the polls is an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
The tenor of the argument suggested, however, that rather than simply decide the case in favor of the state, a majority of five justices would go further and rule that the challenge to the statute, the strictest voter-identification law in the country, was improperly brought in the first place. Such a ruling could make it much more difficult to challenge any new state election regulations before they go into effect.
The Indiana Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the 2005 law before it went into effect, seeking a declaration that it was unconstitutional on its face and could not be enforced even against the majority of Indiana voters who could easily produce the required photo ID. Such an approach, known as a “facial challenge,” is the standard way of attacking election regulations like the poll taxes that the Supreme Court struck down in the 1960s and more recent redistricting and ballot-access cases.
But the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has displayed deep skepticism toward such challenges, most notably on the subject of abortion, on the grounds that they require courts to step outside a limited role of resolving concrete disputes brought by parties with actual injuries.
“You seem to accept that a facial challenge is appropriate here,” Justice Antonin Scalia said with evident disapproval to Thomas M. Fisher, the Indiana solicitor general, who was defending a lower court’s judgment that the law was constitutional.
Indiana, in fact, had not objected to the form in which the case was brought. That argument was introduced by the Bush administration, which entered the case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, No. 07-21, after the Supreme Court agreed in September to hear it. In the administration’s brief, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement urged the justices to uphold “principles of judicial restraint” by rejecting the facial challenge.
Joining Mr. Fisher in arguing for the state on Wednesday, Mr. Clement said the court should wait for a case to be brought by someone who was actually barred by the statute from casting a ballot. Such a lawsuit “could focus like a laser beam” on particular problems, Mr. Clement said, adding that if such a case were successful, it would have the virtue of producing a remedy that solved the problem without invalidating the entire law.
Justice David H. Souter countered, “That would be a virtue, but one of the vices would be that it would be after the election, and the entire matter would be academic for another two years.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raised a similar objection. “The reason they are bringing a facial challenge is because the horse is going to be out of the barn,” she said. “They will have the election, and just what they are afraid of could happen — that the result will be skewed in favor of the opposite party.”
Justice Ginsburg’s subtle but unmistakable allusion was to the partisan context in which voter identification laws, recently adopted by a handful of Republican-dominated states, are being debated. Democrats charge that the true purpose of the laws is to deter participation by some predictably Democratic voters, particularly poor people and members of minority groups who are less likely than others to have driver’s licenses or passports.
The Bush administration has raised the suspicions of Democrats by making what they call “voter fraud” a priority for Justice Department enforcement. No prosecution for impersonating a registered voter, the type of fraud that would be prevented by a photo requirement, has ever been brought, however.
“No one has been punished for this kind of fraud in living memory in this country,” Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer arguing for the Democrats, told the justices.
In his opinion last year upholding the Indiana law, Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit agreed with the Democratic plaintiffs that the law would fall more heavily on Democrats than on Republicans. But that did not make the statute unconstitutional, he said.
On Wednesday, discussion of the law’s justification, and of the extent of the burden it placed on voters, was inconclusive. Mr. Fisher, Indiana’s lawyer, said that because photo identification was “necessary to do so many everyday activities,” the number of those affected was “infinitesimal.” Mr. Smith said the number was more likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Under the Indiana law, voters who are turned away for lack of identification may cast provisional ballots, which are counted only if the voter travels to the county clerk’s office within 10 days to show the required identification or sign a sworn statement that he cannot afford to obtain such an identification. The plaintiffs have argued that this extra step and required travel create an unnecessary burden that other states with identification requirements do not impose; those states do not require voters to make a second trip in order to have a provisional counted.
Chief Justice Roberts, who grew up in Indiana, did not seem to find the burden excessive. “County seats aren’t very far for people in Indiana,” he said.
Mr. Smith replied that the county seat in Lake County was a 17-mile bus ride from the county’s urban center of Gary. “If you’re indigent, that’s a significant burden,” he said. The chief justice also seemed unimpressed by the absence of known voter impersonators. “It’s a type of fraud that, because it’s fraud, it’s hard to detect,” he said to Mr. Smith.
Justice Scalia interrupted the debate over the law’s impact in order to frame his argument against facial challenges.
“Why are we arguing about whether there is one-half of one percent of the electorate who may be adversely affected and as to whom it might be unconstitutional?” he asked Mr. Fisher, adding: “This court is sitting back and looking at the ceiling and saying, oh, we can envision not the case before us, but other cases. Maybe it’s one-half of one percent or maybe it’s 45 percent, who knows. But we can imagine cases in which this law could be unconstitutional, and therefore, the whole law is unconstitutional. That’s not ordinarily the way courts behave, is it?”
“I should hope not,” the Indiana solicitor general replied.
Read more in the New York Times
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