Washington, DC—Today, the Indiana Court of Appeals struck down a controversial voter identification law. In response, Tova Andrea Wang, Senior Democracy Fellow at Demos, a national public policy center that has conducted extensive research and legal work on Voter ID and election reform, issued the following statement in support of the decision:
We have known for years now, through a broad array of research and reports from voters themselves, that laws requiring citizens to present government issued photo identification at the polls on Election Day prevent legitimate American voters from exercising their right to vote. They particularly disenfranchise the elderly, people of color, the poor, people with disabilities and students. It has also been obvious that the purported justification for these laws, the prevention of in-person fraud at the polling place, is a total canard. One of the ways in which this has been most evident has been the exemption from such laws of people who vote by absentee ballot—when it is absentee ballot fraud that actually does occasionally occur.
Indiana has the strictest voter identification law in the country. Today, the court saw through the convoluted nature of the law in recognizing that exempting absentee voters, as well as voters living in state facilities, exposed the lack of a legitimate governmental purpose for the law and violated the state constitution's provision guaranteeing equal privileges and immunities.
Even before the United States Supreme Court unfortunately rejected a facial federal constitutional challenge to Indiana’s law last year, it had become apparent that pursuing challenges at the state level under state constitutional provisions might be a more effective path to getting rid of these laws that prevent our citizens from voting. One reason for this is that some states have more strongly worded provisions regarding the right to vote in their constitutions than those contained in the U.S. Constitution. Missouri courts struck down that state’s ID law under the Missouri Constitution and there is still a state-based challenge pending in Georgia.
Hopefully this decision today will encourage those across the United States who care about our democracy to reject the call for overreaching voter identification laws that rob legitimate citizens their right to vote and, where these laws do exist, to pursue more cases like the League of Women Voters vs Todd Rokita decided in Indiana today.
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