A paper by three professors from the University of Washington, UC Irvine and the University of New Mexico examines the effect of Indiana's voter-ID law, the strictest in the nation. The authors conclude that "voter identification laws in Indiana do disenfranchise many citizens who are entitled to full voting rights."
Given that the argument in favor of ID laws is that they will prevent fraud, coupled with the fact that there have been few allegations of fraud with any merit, the study's finding should be sufficient to show that Indiana's law violates the Constitution.
As I suspect most of you know, that is not the end of the story. Voter ID laws are not pushed by disinterested members of the public who champion good government. They are the almost-exclusive province of Republicans.
The study's authors conclude that:
Institutional burdens to participating have long been established to have the largest impact on individuals who have fewer resources, less education, smaller social networks and are more institutionally isolated. Increasing barriers to voting are likely to have the largest impact on these groups, and we find strong evidence to support our thesis that strict voter identification laws would substantially affect those groups negatively.
Who are in the groups negatively affected? Older people. Ethnic minorities. Marginal workers. All groups who vote mainly for Democratic candidates. And that's what it's all about: not stopping vote fraud, but stopping Democrats. As many observers have pointed out, if Florida had not wrongly disenfranchised thousands and thousands of black voters in 2000, we would never have heard of hanging chads, and Al Gore would never have won the Nobel Prize. Or if he had, it would have been for his work as President.
Repubs should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a movement designed to undercut the foundation of our democracy. But shame has long been a stranger in their ranks.
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