[NYTr] The Most Important Election Case Since Bush v. Gore?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Alternet - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/68368/

The Most Important Election Case Since Bush v. Gore?

By Steven Rosenfeld

New voter ID card-related barriers stopped legitimate voters earlier
this month in Indiana, where the Supreme Court is reviewing the
constitutionality of its voter ID law.

Ray Wardell, a 78-year-old Korean War veteran, could not get a new
state voter ID card after his wallet was stolen because Indiana's
Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) would not accept his Medicare card --
even though the BMV accepted that photo ID instead of his birth
certificate a year before. Wardell ended up voting with a provisional
ballot, but that will not be counted unless the disabled veteran
appears before county election officials with further identification.

Mike Westervelt, a Purdue University student and city editor of the
campus newspaper, was told by BMV employees they would not accept his
New Jersey driver's license as one of three necessary documents to get
an Indiana voter ID card -- even though the Secretary of State's
website listed out-of-state licenses as acceptable. Westervelt said --
and voting rights lawyers affirmed -- that the section of Indiana law
cited by BMV to deny a voter ID card contained no prohibitions on
out-of-state licenses. He too voted provisionally, and is trying to
resolve issues with his county election board before his vote is
counted.

And Kim Tilman, a stay-at-home mother of seven whose husband is a
janitor, who does not have her Michigan birth certificate and has run
into delays trying to get a copy, said she cannot afford all the
involved costs -- which range between $26 and $50 -- to obtain an
Indiana voter ID card, despite her hope to vote in the presidential
contests.

"These folks are not used to dealing with this," said Karen Celestino
Horseman, attorney for the League of Women Voters of Indiana. "People
will say this is not the same as a poll tax, or a literacy test. But to
go and vote, you need to have resources to find your way through the
system."

Since 2000, numerous states have passed or tightened voter ID laws to
prevent what Republicans say is widespread voter fraud, or people
voting more than once. Critics say there has been little actual voter
fraud, few federal prosecutions and convictions, and that the laws'
purpose is an attempt by Republicans to shape the electorate by
targeting likely Democratic voters.

Indiana's law, which went into effect in 2006, is one of the toughest
in the nation. It is being reviewed by the Supreme Court to determine
if it poses unconstitutional barriers to voting. According to numerous
amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court, the barriers experienced by
Wardell, Westervelt, Tillman and others during the state's recent 2007
local elections are modern descendents of now-illegal Jim Crow election
laws.

"The burden for a poor person, an old person, or an old person who is
poor, could be quite substantial," the Campaign Legal Center, a
Washington public interest law firm, and Harvard University Law
School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice wrote.
"Indiana's photo ID law falls within this unfortunate American
tradition of disenfranchising laws passed under the guise of electoral
reform."

The brief notes that poll taxes in Texas before World War 1 "affected
not only the poor in general but also the disproportionately poor Black
and Latino populations. In 1913, nine years after the $1.75 tax went
into effect ($1.50 was imposed by the state, and counties had the
option of imposing an additional 25 cents), it had the buying power of
$36.36 in today's dollars."

Today, the total cost cited by Tillman of obtaining her birth
certificate and the other documentation needed to get a "free" Indiana
state voter ID card is on par with Texas' 1913 poll tax. The
Constitution's 24th Amendment says the right of citizens to vote "shall
not be denied or abridged" for "failure to pay any poll tax or other
tax."

The barriers to voting experienced by Westervelt and Wardell are modern
version of the literacy tests used by Democrats in pre-Civil Rights Era
southern states to prevent Blacks from voting, the Indiana League of
Women Voter's Horseman said.

"Voting should be the simplest of the fundamental rights that we
exercise," she said, saying the hurdles faced by Wardell, Westervelt --
and others cited in the League's brief, including examples from
Indiana's 2006 elections -- were a bureaucratic literacy test. "You are
talking about burdening someone's constitutional rights."

Other obstacles faced by Indiana voters included elderly people who did
not have birth certificates, women whose married names did not match
names on their birth certificates, and "hundreds of Amish and
Mennonites... faced with a choice between exercising their religious
freedom and their right to vote" because they believe photographs are
"graven images," the League's legal brief said.

An estimated 43,000 eligible Indiana voters neither have an Indiana
driver's license nor a state photo ID, the Campaign Legal Center and
The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute said in its brief.

Horseman said many middle-class people "do not understand" that the
poor, the elderly, college students and some religious people do not
have the photo documentation to vote. "They say you can't get around in
this world without a photo ID," she said. "Take Mary Elbe. She's lived
and worked on a farm for 92 years. Everyone in her county knows her,
but now she can't vote. It's ridiculous."

Indiana officials responsible for overseeing its elections are in
several state government departments.

The Secretary of State's office said the Bureau of Motor Vehicles is
responsible for creating its own "administrative rules" for
implementing the voter ID law passed by the state legislature. The
Secretary of State's office did not comment on the contradiction
between the list of acceptable documents posted on its website that can
be used to get a "free" state voter ID card, which included
out-of-state driver's licenses, and the BMV policy apparently rejecting
out-of-state licenses. Indiana BMV Communications Director Dennis
Rosebrough declined to comment, saying, "in so far as it is part of a
lawsuit, I am constrained in what I can comment on."

However, in legal briefs filed with the Supreme Court, Indiana
Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican, said claims by litigants
like the state's League of Women Voters, Indiana Democratic Party,
Campaign Legal Center and others that state residents were losing their
voting rights under the new voter ID law were baseless.

"No plaintiff could identify a singe actual voter who could not or
would not vote because of the Voter ID law," Rokita's August 6, 2007
brief said, arguing that state governments -- not the Supreme Court --
were best-suited to regulate their elections. In a follow-up brief on
September 17, Rokita cited voter ID court rulings from other states
where "plaintiffs simply have failed to prove that the character and
magnitude of the asserted injury to the right to vote caused by the
Voter ID law is significant."

However, other Supreme Court litigants opposing the voter ID law --
notably the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law
School and the University of Washington Institute for the Study of
Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality -- have since conducted extensive polling
among low-income and minority Indiana residents and found these
populations often lack access to the forms of ID required by Indiana to
vote.

There research, based on telephone interviews with 1,000 registered
voters and 500 non-registered adults conducted in October 2007, found:

    * 21.8 percent of black Indiana voters do not have access to a
valid photo ID, compared to 15.8 percent of white Indiana voters ;

    * When non-registered eligible voter responses are included, the
gap widens. 28.3 percent of eligible black voters in Indiana have no
valid photo ID, compared to 16.8 percent of eligible voting age white
residents .

    * Among registered voters with proper ID, 41.6 percent are
registered Republicans and 32.5 percent are Democrats .

"For years, this has been a debate long on sensational [voter fraud]
allegations and short on facts," said Wendy Weiser, Brennan Center's
Democracy Project deputy director, in a prepared statement. "Well,
there are finally facts and they suggest that the Indiana law has
nothing to do with preventing voter fraud and everything to do with
suppressing the votes of minority and low-income voters, students and
seniors, with a substantial partisan skew."

Ironically, Indiana's voter ID law was not the only barrier faced by
voters in the state's local elections earlier this month. In West
Lafayette in Tippecanoe County, where some Purdue University students
live, a new computerized voter registration system did not identify as
many as 90 people as registered voters, when some were legal voters,
the Perdue student newspaper, The Exponent, reported on November 8,
2007.

Tippecanoe County Clerk Linda Phillips said several residents who did
not cast provisional ballots returned later in the day to vote -- after
the computer glitch was solved, the student newspaper reported. But one
person who tried to vote, was rebuffed and did not return later in the
day, was the Exponent's managing editor.

"She couldn't return to vote later in the day due to her busy
schedule," the paper reported. "That's at least two of us whose votes
are in question. Anyone else?"

[Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of
"What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the
2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press,
2006).]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.