Hoosier election officials were spared a mad scramble to rewrite Election Day rules Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court said the state can require voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot.
The 6-3 ruling came a week before the most hard-fought presidential primary campaign in Indiana since 1968, and voter turnout is expected to be unusually high. The decision means election officials won’t have to change procedures the state has used since 2005 and that were adopted to prevent ballot-booth fraud.
The Democratic Party, which sued to block the law, said the law is a subtle way to reduce the turnout of Democratic-leaning poor people and minorities, who are less likely to have a proper ID than white, middle-class voters. But a majority of the Supreme Court was not sympathetic to that argument.
The law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,’ ” according to the opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens. “We cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters.”
Indiana’s Republican-backed voter ID law requires voters to present a driver’s license or other government-issued photo identification.
A Hoosier who shows up to vote without a picture ID may cast a provisional ballot but must present a photo ID to the county election board within 10 days. People who vote by mail-in absentee ballot before Election Day are exempt. People who have religious objections to being photographed and indigent people can cast a provisional ballot on Election Day but must go to the county courthouse within 10 days to sign an affidavit swearing they are who they say they are.
Other states have similar laws, but Indiana’s is the strictest in the nation.
A dissenting opinion written by Justice David Souter said Indiana’s voter ID law “threatens to impose non-trivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens.”
But Justice Antonin Scalia, who agreed with the majority but wrote an opinion favoring a broader ruling, said: “The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. 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.’ ”
If the Supreme Court had ruled against Indiana’s law eight days before the highly contested Democratic presidential primary, “it would have been very bad, chaotic,” said Todd Rokita, Indiana secretary of state.
Rokita said the decision creates “a very clear road map” and will help ensure “smooth elections with integrity.”
Thomas Fisher, the Indiana solicitor general who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the ruling “vindicates what we thought for nearly three years now … that the voter ID law is a reasonable, common-sense measure to protect the security and integrity of elections particularly given the massive inflation we have of voter registration in Indiana.”
But the chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party, Dan Parker, contended that “nothing has been settled on this issue.”
“Indiana is being asked to wait until additional disenfranchisement occurs in order to fix this flawed legislation, but this will not stop the Democratic Party from continuing to stand up for those who need a voice,” he said.
When the GOP-led state legislature adopted the law, its backers argued that matching a voter to a driver’s license or other photo ID was necessary to prevent people trying to vote in someone else’s name.
“The threat of voter fraud is a ruse,” said Kathryn Kolbert, president of People For the American Way Foundation. “Study after study shows that there is no widespread in-person fraud by voters in this country, but there are millions of eligible voters who don’t have the ID these laws require – senior citizens who don’t drive, students, the disabled, low-income people, all of whom have the right to vote. These laws throw up barriers that keep people away from the polls.”
Stevens’ opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy. Justices Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately.
Justices Souter, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.
sylviasmith@jg.net
Niki Kelly of The Journal Gazette contributed to this story.