Excerpts from Supreme Court ruling for voter ID requirement

Excerpts from Monday's 6-3 Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana's law requiring voters to present a picture ID before they vote:

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing to uphold the law: "Indiana's own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago mayor - though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud - demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election."

"The record says virtually nothing about the difficulties faced by either indigent voters or voters with religious objections to being photographed. ... In sum, on the basis of the record that has been made in this litigation, we cannot conclude that the statute imposes 'excessively burdensome requirements' on any class of voters."

"Finally we note that petitioners have not demonstrated that the proper remedy - even assuming an unjustified burden on some voters - would be to invalidate the entire statute."

"In their briefs, petitioners stress the fact that all of the Republicans in the General Assembly voted in favor" of the law "and the Democrats were unanimous in opposing it. ... It is fair to infer that partisan considerations may have played a significant role in the decision to enact" the law and "if such considerations had provided the only justification for a photo identification requirement, we may assume" that the law "would suffer the same fate as the poll tax. But if a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators."

---

Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring: "The lead opinion assumes petitioners' premise that the voter-identification law 'may have imposed a special burden on' some voters, but holds that petitioners have not assembled evidence to show that the special burden is severe enough to warrant strict scrutiny. That is true enough, but for the sake of clarity and finality as well as adherence to precedent, I prefer to decide these cases on the grounds that petitioners' premise is irrelevant and that the burden at issue is minimal and justified."

"This calls for application of a deferential 'important regulatory interests' standard for nonsecure, nondiscriminatory restrictions, reserving strict scrutiny for laws that severely restrict the right to vote."

---

Justice David Souter, in dissent: "Indiana's 'Voter, ID law' threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the state's citizens, and a significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting. ... A state may not burden the right to vote merely by invoking abstract interests, be they legitimate, or even compelling, but must make a particular, factual showing that threats to its interests outweigh the particular impediments it has imposed. The state has made no such justification here, and as to some aspects of its law, it has hardly even tried."

---

Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting: "I believe the statute is unconstitutional because it imposes a disproportionate burden upon those eligible voters who lack a driver's license or other statutorily valid form of photo ID."