Monday, April 28, 2008: The Supreme Court upholds Indiana’s voting law.
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The Supreme Court began its new term on October 1. One of the cases on the docket is an Indiana voter identification case.
Earlier this year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (7th Circuit) upheld an Indiana state law that requires voters to present a government-issued photo ID before casting ballots in person in primary and general elections. Absentee voters and nursing home residents are exempt.
With straight faces, I presume, the plaintiffs claim the photo ID requirement is an “undue burden on the right to vote.” Before the most recent law went into effect, Indiana voters had to sign a poll book, and a copy of their signature remained on file for comparison.
The 7th Circuit wastes no time getting to the real reason the photo ID requirement was challenged. From the opinion (PDF):
No doubt most people who don’t have photo ID are low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates – Thus the new law injures the Democratic Party by compelling the party to devote resources to getting to the polls those of its supporters who would otherwise be discouraged by the new law from bothering to vote.
I encourage you to read the 15-page opinion (which includes a dissenting opinion). It’s pretty straight forward. The court noted that none of the plaintiffs argued or presented evidence that they don’t intend to vote because of the photo ID requirement, nor did they present citizens who made such claims. The real motivation behind the lawsuit, the court reasoned, was “simply that the law may require the Democratic Party and the other organizational plaintiffs to work harder to get every last one of their supporters to the polls.”
The plaintiffs likened the photo ID law to a poll tax, the purpose of which was to discourage blacks from voting. The purpose of the photo ID law is to prevent fraud at the polls, and fraud impinges on honest voters. In that regard, the 7th Circuit found the photo ID requirement to be a reasonable regulation on elections.
As you know, the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) prevents states from denying citizens the right to vote based on race. Back in the day, whites used a variety of tactics to get around the “right of citizens…to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race” language. One was a “grandfather clause,” which required a voter to be a descendant of those who had the right to vote. Since slaves couldn’t vote, the descendant requirement meant that few newly freed blacks could vote. Some states required literacy tests. Since educating a slave was illegal, many newly freed slaves couldn’t read or write, which meant they couldn’t pass the literacy test. And many were poor, which meant they couldn’t afford to pay the poll tax.
The Voting Rights of 1965 gave the Fifteenth Amendment teeth.
Longtime readers know I’ve been hard on black Democrats in Georgia for comparing the state’s photo ID voting requirement to a poll tax. They should know better, but being a politician doesn’t mean you’re smart or knowledgeable or that you have common sense or a sense of shame. At any rate, the Georgia Supreme Court threw out a case challenging the law in August, because the plaintiff lacked legal standing. Citizens who wanted to vote in a special election last month had to show photo ID.
Voting is a fundamental right that is subject to reasonable restrictions, and grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes certainly were not reasonable restrictions. But this isn’t 1865 or even 1965. It’s 2007. People who want to vote can get off their lazy butts and go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get a state-issued ID if they don’t have a driver’s license. If they can’t afford to pay, they don’t have to pay. In an earlier post, I made the point that if people can go to their polling places, what’s stopping them from going to the DMV?
But — and here’s where the Stepin Fetchit reference comes in — black politicians in Georgia argue that the photo ID will disenfranchise poor people, black people, and old people. This is what I wrote in Voting Identification Requirement…:
“Poor, black and elderly” citizens don’t know how to go down to city hall or the DMV to get an identification card? First of all, why don’t they already have picture identification? Don’t they drive or hold jobs? How do they cash checks, both welfare and earned, and open accounts, without proof that they’re who they purport to be? Ridiculous…[This] is not 1954, and blacks are not still “overcoming.” We are a free people with all the rights and privileges (and RESPONSIBILITIES) of citizenship.
It’s maddening, not to mention embarrassing, that black elected officials walked out of the state house in protest against the law, put on shackles, and sang protest songs. Talk about hyperbole! In a post called Georgia’s Darkies, I castigate those politicians for such tactics and for perpetuating the stereotype that blacks are too stupid/lazy/shiftless/ignorant to comply with the law like everyone else.
I won’t repeat the rant here. You can read it for yourselves. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will settle the matter.
(I wanted to ask Justice Thomas about this case but couldn’t because it’s pending.)
Update: A reader writes: “It is very ironic that Indiana democrats would be fighting this law when the Marion County (mostly Indianapolis) Clerk – a democrat – effectively disenfranchised thousands in the primary elections this year — 5 polling places didn’t even open!” See this story.
Incidentally, yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall’s swearing in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He was appointed several months earlier as the first black justice. Most people know Marshall successfully argued that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as a lawyer for the NAACP.
Another case he successfully argued before the Supreme Court was a voting rights case called Smith v. Allwright (1944).
A black man sued to vote in Texas primary elections. At the time, Democrats in that state limited primary voting to whites. The party argued that it was a voluntary association and had the right to determine its own membership. The court examined whether the party’s discrimination against blacks was a private or a state action. Private organizations, as I assume you know, can discriminate on whatever basis (men only, blacks only, etc.).
The court contended (emphasis added): “We think that this statutory system for the selection of party nominees for inclusion on the general election ballot makes the party which is required to follow these legislative directions an agency of the state in so far as it determines the participants in a primary election.”
Related post:
