Early in the morning of Oct. 18, the Supreme Court released its decision on a hotly debated topic: Texas’s 2011 law requiring state-issued photo IDs to vote.

America’s highest court found the law constitutional, effective immediately. This means that this election day, all Texas citizens must present photo ID when they cast their ballots.

This law may seem like it is intended to decrease voter fraud, but that problem is so miniscule in the United States that this law is completely unnecessary. It does not target fraud; it targets the votes of minorities and the poor. The Supreme Court needs to change its decision and repeal this law.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented from the majority and was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan.
In Texas, there were only two cases of voter fraud prosecuted to conviction from 2002-2011, according to Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion. This is hardly a big enough problem to require a law and three years of subsequent court cases to defend it. Ginsburg’s dissent also pointed out that “a sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters [affected by the law] are African-American or Hispanic.”

An Oct. 19 CNN article confirmed this, citing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in saying that 25 percent of African-Americans and 16 percent of Latinos nationwide would not have proper ID to vote under this law. These minorities have typically been a strong source of support for Democrats, according to a Gallup poll.

A Pew Research poll showed that low-income voters also tend to vote for Democrats. If they do not have the means to get a required ID, it could lead to a decrease in votes from the demographic.

The law also will not accept college IDs, affecting the 18-24 demographic. This group is also strongly Democratic, according to Gallup.
When the ability of these groups to vote is impeded, the number of Democratic votes will fall as well, which seems to be the underlying intention behind this law.

With the midterm elections approaching, the Supreme Court could not have chosen a worse time to release its decision. Its Oct. 18 ruling gave those without IDs less than three weeks to get them before Nov. 4. This includes 600,000 eligible voters who currently lack state-issued IDs, according to an Oct. 18 CNN article. Ginsburg also stated that 400,000 eligible voters face a round-trip of three hours or longer just to get state-issued IDs.

Election Identification Certificates, the minimum identification needed to vote in Texas, do not cost anything. However, they do require a certified birth certificate or other identifying document, which can be difficult to obtain and many cannot even afford.

A photo ID law is not just inconvenient, it is borderline unconstitutional. Both Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, who heard a lower court proceeding on this law, and Attorney General Eric Holder branded the law a poll tax, according to an Oct. 18 MSNBC article. Poll taxes were made unconstitutional in 1964 with the 24th amendment.

No law should place such an excessive burden on voters for an unjustifiable reason. Instead of protecting voting rights, this law actually takes them away. It will decrease the number of votes from minorities and other typically left-leaning groups. I am ashamed that the Supreme Court let this law stand and implore them to reconsider the true legality behind it.

Kathryn Krawczyk is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at kjkrawczyk@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @KathrynKrawczyk.

Published on October 30, 2014 at 12:01 am