Wednesday, November 09, 2016
What now for voter ID? Frankly it doesn't look good. I was expecting Clinton to win, to be generally horrible, but to push back against voter ID for purely self-interested reasons. Now Trump will nominate someone to fill that 9th seat. Maybe a principled movement conservative like Scalia, maybe just a crony. He'll have an AG who will be the reverse of Holder. Obama had 8 years to get rid of voter ID, and did little about it till just near the end.
One possible scenario is that Trump will overreach with both executive acts and legislative proposals, and the judiciary will awaken to its role as a guardian of the constitution.
Under that kind of heightened scrutiny, courts might, for instance, follow the Wisconsin Supreme Court's lead and notice that most of the voter ID plans function as a poll tax.
Or we could get a case where someone takes seriously the Anderson test balancing of Crawford, and shows that voter ID is a severe-ish burden with little direct connection to legitimate state interests.
But overall I expect things to get worse before they get better.
I cast my absentee vote for Gary Johnson, which might or might not have been legal, since I was able to make it back from out of state, so I wasn't really absent. I now expect I'll return to my habit of casting provisional ballots that don't get counted; I'm that one guy that's been disenfranchised.
Or maybe I'll just get a hotel room across county lines so I can vote absentee, although that strikes me as a poll tax of sorts.
Missouri has amended its constitution to get around that pesky right to free and open elections, but just maybe some other states will notice they still have such a clause in their own constitutions.
From where I sit in Indiana, that looks like it will be more the execption that the rule. Meanwhile technology marches on, and new uses will be found for our internal passports. Of course you need ID to use a computer....
One possible scenario is that Trump will overreach with both executive acts and legislative proposals, and the judiciary will awaken to its role as a guardian of the constitution.
Under that kind of heightened scrutiny, courts might, for instance, follow the Wisconsin Supreme Court's lead and notice that most of the voter ID plans function as a poll tax.
Or we could get a case where someone takes seriously the Anderson test balancing of Crawford, and shows that voter ID is a severe-ish burden with little direct connection to legitimate state interests.
But overall I expect things to get worse before they get better.
I cast my absentee vote for Gary Johnson, which might or might not have been legal, since I was able to make it back from out of state, so I wasn't really absent. I now expect I'll return to my habit of casting provisional ballots that don't get counted; I'm that one guy that's been disenfranchised.
Or maybe I'll just get a hotel room across county lines so I can vote absentee, although that strikes me as a poll tax of sorts.
Missouri has amended its constitution to get around that pesky right to free and open elections, but just maybe some other states will notice they still have such a clause in their own constitutions.
From where I sit in Indiana, that looks like it will be more the execption that the rule. Meanwhile technology marches on, and new uses will be found for our internal passports. Of course you need ID to use a computer....
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