Was Justice Steven’s Water Spiked?

It must have been, because Justice Stevens has been a reliable voice for liberals, until yesterday when he sided with the extremist right of the court on the issue of Voter ID’s. I’ve been mulling this over since I first heard that SCOTUS upheld Indiana’s extremely narrow Voter ID law.

The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law on Monday, concluding in a splintered decision that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.

The 6-to-3 ruling kept the door open to future lawsuits that provided more evidence. But this theoretical possibility was small comfort to the dissenters or to critics of voter ID laws, who predicted that a more likely outcome than successful lawsuits would be the spread of measures that would keep some legitimate would-be voters from the polls.

Voting experts said the ruling was likely to complicate election administration, leading to both more litigation and more legislation, at least in states with Republican legislative majorities, but would probably have a limited impact on this year’s presidential voting.

The issue has been intensely partisan, with Republicans supporting increased identification requirements for voters and Democrats opposing them. In what the court described as the “lead opinion,” which was written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court acknowledged that the record of the case contained “no evidence” of the type of voter fraud the law was ostensibly devised to detect and deter, the effort by a voter to cast a ballot in another person’s name.

But Justice Stevens said that neither was there “any concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters who now lack photo identification.” The “risk of voter fraud” was “real,” he said, and there was “no question about the legitimacy or importance of the state’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.”

We can all understand the importance of counting “only” the votes of eligible voters, assuming they haven’t lied about their residency, but I don’t think Justice Stevens looked at the actual burden that the Indiana law places on some voters.

Not everyone has a certified birth certificate lying about, the cost to obtain that document is around $10, plus time and money to get to the point of even ordering one’s certified birth certificate. Then there is the time (including travel) and cost of updating/obtaining a Social Security card, then the time and cost of getting to a Motor Vehicle agency that provides photo ID’s. So, no, obtaining a photo ID is NOT free. It may be free at the point of obtaining the ID at the motor vehicle office, but to get to that point can be costly for quite a few people.

For her to get the card, she first needed a certified copy of her birth certificate, a new Social Security card and other documents. Because of her physical disability, home health assistants often had to accompany her to the various bureaucratic offices. Vaughn said she spent more than $100 on fees and transportation to get the documents.

Now, you cannot tell me that getting your government issued ID is “free.” To ignore the cost up to the point of getting to the motor vehicle department is to ignore reality.

While Indiana non-driver photo ID may be free, other states are not. For example, TN charges $9.50 for a photo ID only, if one is over 18, and $5 if one is under 18 years old. (I reference TN, because the republican controlled senate passed a voter ID law, but it stalled in the House, to which Bill Hobbs ranted about). And to get to the point of having the necessary documentation to even pay for your photo ID, costs even more.

None of this contortion act is “trivial.”