Indiana Political Review

“I’m sorry ma’am. Please put that driver’s license away. I am forbidden by law from verifying that you are who you say you are. Please, just step into the voting booth.” That is a conversation you may hear come November after the Supreme Court hears two Indiana cases.The ACLU and Rep. William Crawford (D-Indianapolis) have each challenged the recent Indiana law which requires voters to produce photo identification at their polling places. Apparently, they believe that some people will have trouble obtaining photo IDs and therefore will be denied their right to vote. When asked to produce evidence that any single person would be denied their right to vote as a result of the law, the challengers were stymied. They could not even find one person.

The new voter ID law has been upheld by the U.S. District Court of Indiana and the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now it is headed to the Supreme Court. The Court of Appeals upheld the law by a 2-1 vote. The first paragraph of the dissent by Judge Terrence Evans reads:

Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic. We should subject this law to strict scrutiny—or at least, in the wake of Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428 (1992), something akin to “strict scrutiny light”—and strike it down as an  undue burden on the fundamental right to vote.

I just spent the last three years of my life in law school. This summer has been devoted almost entirely to studying for (and passing - woohoo!) the Indiana bar. And I have one question: What in the hell is “strict scrutiny light?” Is it somewhere between intermediate scrutiny and strict scrutiny? The dissent has made up an entirely new level of scrutiny and argues that it should be applied to this case. This new level of scrutiny looks a lot like “strict scrutiny.” I’m not really sure what is “light” about finding that the law is an undue burden on a fundamental right as the dissent suggests ought to happen.

The dissent characterized the new law as being designed solely to discourage voter turnout by Democrats. I’m going make my own characterization of the law. Isn’t it just common sense to require that people who present themselves at the polling place should be required to identify themselves? Otherwise, how do you keep people who are not authorized to vote from voting? Shouldn’t an illegal immigrant at least have to go to the trouble of procuring a fake ID from the BMV (at whatever minimal risk of theoretical prosecution that exposes him to) before sauntering into a polling place, impersonating a legal voter and casting his vote for Julia Carson? Common sense seems to indicate that it’s the least we could do.