Disenfranchising voters

As I sit here writing, I have in my pocket my Indiana driver’s license, a government-issued photo identification. Complying with Indiana’s new law requiring presentation of such ID before voting wouldn’t be a problem for me. Likely, it wouldn’t be a problem for most Hoosiers.

But like many government regulations, the new burden signed into law by Gov. Daniels last week will have its greatest negative impact on the most vulnerable of our neighbors. The government-issued photo ID requirement, which earns Indiana the dubious distinction of having the most restrictive voting barrier in the United States, will disenfranchise some of our fellow citizens.

Senior groups estimate that as many as one-third of all persons 75 years or older don’t have a current driver’s license or other photo ID. Last week, one woman told me about her elderly mother who fits into that category. The mother had a severe stroke several years ago, hasn’t had a current photo ID since and doesn’t have the energy and wherewithal to run the bureaucratic gauntlet of getting background documents necessary to obtain a new one. “If someone said my mother had to get that ID before she could vote, she likely wouldn’t vote at all,” the daughter said.

Because of age or disability, many Hoosiers are confined to nursing homes or are otherwise unable to easily obtain new identification to comply with the voting restrictions. The difficulty can be compounded for those living in rural areas, where transportation assistance can be harder to come by and license branches farther away. Also, many other Hoosiers will have trouble affording the purchase of background documents, usually including a sealed birth certificate, necessary to obtain a state-issued ID. That hidden cost of reaching Indiana’s voting booths constitutes an indirect poll tax, and thus is far too reminiscent of the most ugly legacy in U.S. voting history.

That is why the Indiana Civil Liberties Union represents a leading senior citizens group, a dedicated disability rights organization and advocates for the poor and homeless in a legal challenge to the new photo identification requirement. Truly a solution in search of a problem, our new state law erects a barrier in front of Hoosier voting booths while doing nothing to address lawmakers’ purported concern about voter fraud. The new rule violates the hard-won constitutional guarantee of the right to vote, as well as the federal Voting Rights Act, adopted by Congress in 1965 to insure that states stop using unnecessary and burdensome regulations to deter voter participation.

This legislation, and the lawsuit we filed to challenge it, unearthed two of the most common and most regrettable trends in modern political discourse.

The first trend is to govern by polling, even when the polling is a flawed gauge of reasoned public opinion. Daniels told The Indianapolis Star that he signed the photo ID bill into law because “it reflects the sentiment of the state.” At first glance, he appeared to be correct: A poll taken in late March by The Star and WTHR TV found that 75 percent of 1,003 Hoosiers surveyed were in favor of requiring voters to show government-issued ID.

But did the folks responding to that survey make a fully informed choice? Not according to one of those questioned, who took the trouble to contact the ICLU after reading about our lawsuit in The Elkhart Truth. “When I took a poll about requiring IDs to vote, the last thing on my mind was the people that would have a hard time getting one,” he wrote. “I’m sure most [other] people didn’t consider it either. Thanks for explaining the problem and I wish you luck correcting it.”

That extraordinary response suggests that any elected official who sticks a wet finger up to the wind before making a major decision shows not just a regrettable lack of leadership, but also exposes himself to the consequences of making a flawed guess of wind direction.

The second regrettable trend unearthed by this legislation and the subsequent lawsuit was the full-court press toward reducing the impact and relevance of the judicial branch of government. A newspaper columnist wrote that our lawsuit is an example of “advocacy groups dissatisfied with the outcome of the legislative process” turning to the courts for relief. To that charge, ICLU pleads guilty and grateful.

We are grateful because this country is better off for advocacy groups taking their claims for equal justice to court in cases like Brown v. Board of Education and the many lawsuits that gave life to our rights to free speech, personal privacy and due process of law. People whose isolation, poverty or disability conspire to make it difficult for them to obtain the official government ID should offer no apology for turning to the courts.

Our clients in this case don’t have a powerful lobby in the General Assembly or in the Governor’s Office, and so their interests are rarely reflected in the legislation that comes out of the Statehouse. Yet they still have rights. So we should all be thankful that this country’s founders had the wisdom to adopt the Bill of Rights to establish minority protection, and the foresight to create the judicial branch to enforce those rights.

Fran Quigley is the executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, www.iclu.org.