• Listen to this segment

GUEST: Garrett Epps, Orlando John and Marian H. Hollis Professor of Law at the University of Oregon, author of Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America

A week before Indiana’s presidential primary on May 6th, the Supreme Court upheld the state’s controversial Voter ID law. In a 6-3 vote issued yesterday, the high court decided that the Republican crafted legislation requiring voters to produce government-issued photo identification at the polls was not in fact unconstitutional. However, since Indiana passed the law in 2005, Democrats and civil rights organizations have decried it as a means of disenfranchisement. They contend that the photo ID requirements most adversely affect the elderly, minority, and poor sectors of society who also tend to vote Democratic. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, critics also say that the law’s justification in preventing ‘impersonation’ voter fraud is deeply unfounded. Dissenting from the opinions of six of his fellow Supreme Court justices, David Souter wrote that “Indiana’s ‘Voter ID law’ threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the state’s citizens.”