Like I was sayin… sometimes common sense wins out. Today the supreme court ruled that states can require voters to produce a photo id in order to properly identify themselves before voting.
In a 6-3 ruling, the court upheld the Indiana law requiring voters to identify themselves with a photo id before voting. Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter were the dissenting judges joining Indiana democrats and the ACLU opposing the law. The opposition claims that the law deprives citizens of their constitutional right to vote.
In issuing an opinion, Justice Scalia said the following:
“The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not “even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.’”
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Souter claimed that the Indiana law:
“threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens.”
The ACLU claimed that requiring IDs would put an undo burden on poor and minority voters as they would have to acquire IDs. They further stated that it was an attempt to stop the poor, the elderly, and minorities from voting. However, Indiana provides free state photo ids to those that can not afford them.
20 states already require voters to provide identification before voting.
