Editorial: Voter ID ruling will rank among court's worst

The U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling on Indiana's voter ID law will rank as among the court's worst – up there with Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling allowing forced separation of the races. It wasn't overturned until 1954. Here's hoping it doesn't take 58 years to overturn Monday's misguided decision.

The Indiana law is aimed at a phantasm: in-person voter fraud at the polls. In the words of the court's majority, "The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history." To find fraud, the justices went back to New York City in 1868. They also noted one possible case of fraud out of 2.8 million ballots cast in Washington's 2004 election. Yet they upheld the strictest voter ID law in the nation, one that disproportionately hits citizens who are old or young or urban or poor.

Indiana requires voters to show a government-issued photo ID (such as a driver's license) with a current address. This may not sound onerous, but it can be to large groups of people.

Consider the case of Theresa Clemente, a 78-year-old registered Indiana voter who has no driver's license. An amicus brief detailed her story. When she heard about Indiana's new law, she attempted to get a qualifying photo ID. She went to the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles with her Social Security card, utility bill, property tax bill, credit card and voter registration card. Not good enough. She needed her birth certificate. She returned with it, only to be told that it was not a "certified copy."

So she mailed an application to Massachusetts, where she was born (cost: $28). She returned to the BMV, only to be told that her birth certificate had her maiden name, not her married name. She had to get a certified copy of her marriage certificate and return a fourth time.

The law also places burdens on voters ages 18 to 25. Many have recently moved to Indiana for college and either do not have a driver's license or have one from their parents' home state. At Indiana University alone, 14,000 students come from other states. Indiana makes it very difficult for these new residents, who should be able to vote at the polls where they live and where local laws affect them. The state doesn't allow voters to show student IDs, or other common forms of ID.

Of course, election laws should guard against fraud, but they also should encourage young people to be lifelong voters, not put up barriers in hope of stopping nonexistent abuses.

The real issue here is vote suppression, not vote fraud. Two Californians, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Elections, wrote in an amicus brief that the aim of the Help American Vote Act of 2002 is to "make it easier, not harder, for every eligible citizen to vote, and to have his or her vote counted." A majority on the Supreme Court doesn't see that. So it's up to Congress to clarify the range of permissible ID that voters can show at the polls, and to require counting provisional ballots with signatures that match those on voter registration files.

President Johnson said in 1964 that "Nothing is so valuable as liberty and nothing is so necessary to liberty as the freedom to vote without bans or barriers." The Supreme Court, alas, has given approval to such barriers.