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For Immediate Release
April 28, 2008
Contact: Tim Rusch, Demos, (212) 389-1407, trusch@demos.org
despite finding little evidence of voter fraud, supreme court upholds indiana voter identification law
Statement from Voting Rights Center Demos: Other states should decline to follow Indiana down the path of imposing unnecessary restrictions on the right to vote
New York, NY--Today, the Supreme Court of The United States upheld one of the nation's most onerous voter identification laws in a six to three ruling on Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board, a case that challenged Indiana's voter ID requirement. In response to the decision, Brenda Wright, Legal Director at Demos, a national public policy and voting rights center that filed an Amicus Brief with other voting rights organizations in support of overturning the Indiana law, issued the following statement:
"Access to voting is the cornerstone of democracy, and that cornerstone is weakened when we impose unnecessary barriers to exercising the right to vote. The Supreme Court's decision today in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, which rejected a facial challenge to Indiana's restrictive photo ID law, is a disappointing departure from our constitutional tradition of recognizing voting as a fundamental right. This ruling upholds a law that will be burdensome for many of Indiana's eligible voters, especially people of color, the poor and elderly voters--those least likely to have access to photo ID.
"Although the Court's decision has rejected one constitutional challenge to Indiana's law, the decision does not establish that restrictive photo ID requirements such as Indiana's are good policy. In fact, the plurality decision recognizes that Indiana's law may be subject to future challenges by specific persons who are unable to surmount the obstacles to securing the required ID documentation. It also acknowledges evidence that the kind of voter impersonation fraud at which photo ID requirements are aimed is extraordinarily rare.
Indeed, the plurality opinion acknowledges that the amici curiae brief in which Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice and other partners joined, refuted virtually every example of voter fraud cited by the trial court as a basis for upholding the law.
In 2003 Demos published a report by David Callahan and Lorraine Minnite entitled Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Election Fraud (updated most recently in October 2007) that is widely recognized as the most comprehensive survey available of the extent of voter fraud in U.S. elections. The report found that voter fraud is rare, that safeguards to prevent such fraud are already in place, and that restrictive photo identification requirements would have little impact on the relatively rare instances of individual voter fraud that occur. The Court's plurality opinion entirely fails to refute or even challenge these findings.
"Photo ID laws as restrictive as Indiana's are thus simply unnecessary for protecting the integrity of the voting process, and are sure to invite further legal challenges from specific persons burdened by those laws. These laws have aptly been described by Demos Senior Fellow Lorraine Minnite as "a solution in search of a problem." Instead of following Indiana down the path of imposing unnecessary restrictions on the right to vote, policymakers and election officials around the country should adopt policies that will increase access to the vote, particularly for the populations--the young, the poor, older voters and people of color--that are unduly burdened by restrictive photo identification requirements."
For more information about voting rights and research on election integrity, including Lorraine Minnite's research on voter fraud, visit www.demos.org.
Members of the press: To schedule an interview with Brenda Wright or Professor Minnite please contact Tim Rusch (see contact information).
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