Close Shave
The best reading in yesterday's opinion by the Supreme Court—which upheld an Indiana law requiring voters to display up to date government issued photo-ID — is in footnote 11 of Justice Stevens' opinion. That's where Justice Stevens draws from the elections in New York City and the misdeeds of Big Tim Sullivan, who, later in his career with Tammany, went on to serve in the Congress. Justice Stevens quotes Sullivan describing his technique for getting a single person into a polling place three or four times on election-day.
"When you've voted 'em with their whiskers on, you take 'em to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote 'em again with the side lilacs and a mustache. Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote 'em a third time with the mustache. If that ain't enough and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote 'em plain face. That makes every one of 'em good for four votes."
We wouldn't suggest that any politicians from Indiana — or any other state for that matter — are practicing Sullivan's election-day techniques. But when a jurist like Justice Stevens reaches back to a time from before even he was born for a demonstration of the dangers of voting fraud, that's a reason to pay attention. All the more so when he is joined by five other justices and the question is whether a state is entitled to put rules in place to ensure that each voter only votes once and that those who do are who they say they are.
Indiana decided that requiring government issued photo-identification was the way to go about it. Its law has prompted some to argue that it could depress turnout among both the elderly and the poor — two demographics that are less likely to have up-to-date ID. We are sensitive to those arguments, as, no doubt, are Justices Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito, not to mention the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, each of whom voted to uphold Indiana's law.
A regulation that requires, at worst, a trip to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles once or twice a decade doesn't strike them as running afoul of the Constitution. Quote Justice Stevens: " ... a voter may lose his photo identification, may have his wallet stolen on the way to the polls, or may not resemble the photo in the identification because he recently grew a beard. Burdens of that sort arising from life's vagaries are neither so serious nor so frequent" as to violate the Constitution. In two separate dissents, Justice Souter, who was joined by Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer, said that the court's decision today parted with precedent striking down poll taxes. But the whole point of a poll tax is to cull the voting rolls, which is in sharp contradistinction to an ID requirement, which has a democratic goal: to keep the barber chairs empty on election day.
