Reply #17: Court should rule photo ID requirement unnecessary

[struggle4progress]

January 6, 2008
BY RON DZWONKOWSKI
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

... am not one for conspiracy theories, but it is hard to overlook the fact that the push for pictured ID over the last two decades has come almost entirely from Republicans and that the people least likely to have such ID are the poor, who for decades have voted largely Democratic.

Consider Michigan: Republican-controlled Legislatures in 1996 and 2005 passed bills requiring pictured ID to vote. The laws were never implemented because of an opinion from longtime state Attorney General Frank Kelley that such a requirement would be unconstitutional. Democrat Kelley said it violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of laws, and the 15th, covering voting rights. Last July, a Michigan Supreme Court dominated by Republican-nominated justices, reversed Kelley. Writing the majority opinion in the 5-2 ruling, Justice Robert Young said the pictured ID requirement was "a reasonable, nondiscriminatory restriction designed to preserve the purity of elections." Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, a Republican, put the rule in place for November's local elections.

There were some complaints about it, but nothing major. The Secretary of State's Office says about 370,000 of Michigan's 7 million registered voters have neither a driver's license nor state ID card (presumably no passport, either) but the Michigan law does provide that these folks can cast a ballot by signing an affidavit of identity.

That's less restrictive than the Indiana requirement, which is the subject of the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Nationally, 21 million Americans lack a government-issued ID with a photograph on it, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which has filed a brief opposing the law ...

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080106/COL32/801060564/1068/OPINION