On April 28, the U.S. Supreme Court mostly upheld Indiana’s law requiring voters at the polls to show a photo Government-ID. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court, and his opinion was co-signed by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy. His opinion is 21 pages long. See here for the opinion.
Justice Antonin Scalia concurred, saying the law is always constitutional, and his concurrence was signed by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Scalia wrote 6 pages.
Justice David Souter write a dissent, co-signed by Justice Ruth Breyer. which is 30 pages. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote his own dissent, which is 5 pages.
The conclusion reached by the Court as a whole is that the law may be unconstitutional as applied to a small number of voters who must incur cost in order to obtain the ID, but that since this case has no such voters as plaintiffs, it fails to reach that claim. Another lawsuit with that particular type of voter as a plaintiff may reach it in the future. Stevens’ decision says, “While it is true that obtaining a birth certificate carries with it a financial cost, the record does not provide even a rough estimate of how many indigent voters lack copies of their birth certificates. Supposition based on extensive Internet research is not an adequate substitute for admissible evidence subject to cross-examination in constitutional litigation.” (Footnote 20). This important footnote provides a guidepath for future litigants.
All of the decisions in this case (the court’s opinion, the concurrence, and the dissent) speak about the ballot access precedents. One encouraging sign is that Justice Scalia acknowledged the Storer v Brown test, that ballot access laws that are seldom used are unconstitutional. That test, created by the Court in 1974, frequently gets overlooked by lower courts, particularly courts in Georgia that close their eyes to the evidence that no minor party has ever managed to qualify a candidate for US House of Representatives. Having the test reiterated in a 2008 decision will help persuade lower courts that the test should be noted and used.