Legal Commentary

Lots of people have said interesting things about the Court's upholding of the Indiana Voter ID statute, including Rick Hasen  (in a 2006 piece in Slate, voter ID laws in Slate, and a more recent piece here)   Vikram Amar, Dan Filler, and Edward Foley and Dan Tokaji. 

My perspective comes from my experience with technology here in Tucson, and it makes me think that requiring a photo ID at the polls is almost perfectly calculated to exclude only legitimate voters, while taking care not to catch any fraudsters.   Reasonably high quality fake ID's are readily available.  The students in my white collar crime clinic prosecuted a man who, for $50, in a matter of minutes, with nothing but a computer, laser printer and laminator, made pretty terrible green cards for the undocumented and pretty good Arizona driver's licenses for thirsty high school kids.  Any fraudulent voting operation could easily mass produce acceptable counterfeit photo ID.  This guide enables bars to check the validity of  ID's--oops, since it is available to the general public, vote fraud folks can also make sure to use the right verification codes.   They look legit.  So requiring photo ID would not prevent organized vote fraud (if it in fact existed, which many commentators seem to doubt).    On the other hand, actual security would be easy to achieve.  Every police car in the State of Arizona can instantaneously pull up a driver's license photo on a wireless laptop--the actual photo of the licensee, so the officer cannot be fooled by a fake document.   There is no reason, if it is important, that  these databases cannot be made available to election workers,  and every voter verified--not merely to verify that they have an ID, real or not, but that they are actually who they say they are.  And of course, photos of people without driver's licenses could be added to this database, or to another one, at the time of registration.  This type of system would have the virtue of actually preventing fraud.  However, this type of verification system would  also allow most everyone to vote, even if,  when asked what kind of ID they have, they answer "nun", the poll worker would just pull up their photo.   Since the states don't seem to do this, commentators may be right that there is no actual fraud problem, but that voter ID is another transaction cost designed to drive down Democratic voter turnout.