The Secretary of State's office said the Bureau of Motor Vehicles is responsible for creating its own "administrative rules" for implementing the voter ID law passed by the state legislature. The Secretary of State's office did not comment on the contradiction between the list of acceptable documents posted on its website that can be used to get a "free" state voter ID card, which included out-of-state driver's licenses, and the BMV policy apparently rejecting out-of-state licenses. Indiana BMV Communications Director Dennis Rosebrough declined to comment, saying, "in so far as it is part of a lawsuit, I am constrained in what I can comment on."
However, in legal briefs filed with the Supreme Court, Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican, said claims by litigants like the state's League of Women Voters, Indiana Democratic Party, Campaign Legal Center and others that state residents were losing their voting rights under the new voter ID law were baseless.
"No plaintiff could identify a singe actual voter who could not or would not vote because of the Voter ID law," Rokita's August 6, 2007 brief said, arguing that state governments -- not the Supreme Court -- were best-suited to regulate their elections. In a follow-up brief on September 17, Rokita cited voter ID court rulings from other states where "plaintiffs simply have failed to prove that the character and magnitude of the asserted injury to the right to vote caused by the Voter ID law is significant."
However, other Supreme Court litigants opposing the voter ID law -- notably the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality -- have since conducted extensive polling among low-income and minority Indiana residents and found these populations often lack access to the forms of ID required by Indiana to vote.
Their research, based on telephone interviews with 1,000 registered voters and 500 non-registered adults conducted in October 2007, found:
- 21.8 percent of black Indiana voters do not have access to a valid photo ID, compared to 15.8 percent of white Indiana voters ;
- When non-registered eligible voter responses are included, the gap widens. 28.3 percent of eligible black voters in Indiana have no valid photo ID, compared to 16.8 percent of eligible voting age white residents .
- Among registered voters with proper ID, 41.6 percent are registered Republicans and 32.5 percent are Democrats .
"For years, this has been a debate long on sensational [voter fraud] allegations and short on facts," said Wendy Weiser, Brennan Center's Democracy Project deputy director, in a prepared statement. "Well, there are finally facts and they suggest that the Indiana law has nothing to do with preventing voter fraud and everything to do with suppressing the votes of minority and low-income voters, students and seniors, with a substantial partisan skew."
Ironically, Indiana's voter ID law was not the only barrier faced by voters in the state's local elections earlier this month. In West Lafayette in Tippecanoe County, where some Purdue University students live, a new computerized voter registration system did not identify as many as 90 people as registered voters, when some were legal voters, the Perdue student newspaper, The Exponent, reported on November 8, 2007.
Tippecanoe County Clerk Linda Phillips said several residents who did not cast provisional ballots returned later in the day to vote -- after the computer glitch was solved, the student newspaper reported. But one person who tried to vote, was rebuffed and did not return later in the day, was the Exponent's managing editor.
"She couldn't return to vote later in the day due to her busy schedule," the paper reported. "That's at least two of us whose votes are in question. Anyone else?"
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case on Jan. 9, 2008.
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