In the Habit of Voting
One of the things they teach you in law school is the advantage of having a sympathetic plaintiff, a person and situation a judge is going to want to find in favor of apart from any of the legal particulars. It’s not the most important part of winning a case, certainly, but if you are going, say, to be challenging mandatory school attendance laws, you’re better off if you plaintiffs are Amish than if they are abusive deadbeats.
Well, it looks as if the folks behind the recent failed challenge to Indiana’s voter ID law may have found themselves some new clients:
About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow sister because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow members of Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.
“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.
Indiana’s photo ID law is the strictest in the country. The Republican-led effort was designed to combat ballot fraud, said supporters, who also have acknowledged that no case involving someone impersonating a voter at the polls has ever been prosecuted in Indiana.
The state’s American Civil Liberties Union sued, calling the law a poll tax that disproportionately affected minorities and elderly voters, those most likely to lack such identification. On April 28, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the law did not violate the Constitution.
Since then, advocacy groups have fretted that people showing up to vote in Tuesday’s primary would not understand their rights under the law, which include being able to cast a provisional ballot and obtain a proper ID within 10 days so that ballot would be counted later.
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Nice. Now, will Indiana go the way of Georgia (according to Bill O’Reilly) and provide IDs to those who cannot show a driver’s license?
The law worked the way is was designed to. The intent of the law was not to remedy in-person voter fraud—one of the most ineffective forms there is, which is why it is virtually unheard of nationwide and there is not a single documented case in Indiana. Like all voter ID laws, the real intent is to make it more difficult for blocs of voters who lean Democratic to vote—the poor, minorities, and the elderly. Elderly nuns tend to be strongly Democratic leaning voters. So the law worked as intended, just as it will come the general election in the fall, when Democrats will have to have a small but significant extra cushion of voters to win in states with such laws.
Those nuns may not be just the best but also the only potential plaintiffs. If the law was “designed” to prevent Democrats from voting, it isn’t working very well.
As the Washington Post reports, “Aside from the eye-catching case of a dozen women of the cloth being turned away at the polls, it does not appear as if Indiana’s strict voter identification law, upheld by the Supreme Court last month, has caused major problems during the state’s primary today. . . . There were few other such incidents reported across the state, which has one of the strictest laws in the country, requiring voters to have a photo ID issued by the state or federal government.”
No the intent of the law is not to stop people from voting. It is to prevent fraud. Fraud occurs and it makes people distrust the system. For instance what we saw in lake County last night does not help matters..
This requirement will become less a bother once people know about it and adapt to it
JH:
All those minorities in Gary, IN and Lake County Indiana – they all look alike we have to have some way to keep them straight.
Yes, “voter fraud” the standard Repooblican line. Need to ensure that only them qualified voters vote – it will probably keep all them Terrooorists away too. How did the Republic survive all these years without voter ID laws.
Well as ArchieBunker’s Jewish Lawyer once told him: “[y]ou can’t beat a stationwagon full of nuns.”