Indiana Voter ID Law Disenfranchises Voters, from Students to Nuns

by Eric Marshall

As predicted, the strict voter ID law in Indiana resulted in what Lawyers’ Committee board member John Borkowski called "an unnecessary barrier to the ballot box" which "disenfranchises legitimate voters." Borkowski witnessed firsthand an incident that was quickly picked up by national media.

The incident, reported by Election Protection, came to light when a group of poll workers, nuns at a local convent, attempted to help a freshman college student through her problems with Indiana’s voter ID law. While they were helping her, they indicated  that some of their fellow nuns also could not vote because of the photo ID law.  Not only was this student disenfranchised, but so would be many of the retired nuns at the convent.  Click here to read Election Protection’s press release detailing this and other incidents in yesterday’s primary.

Columnist Greg Gordon, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, picked up the story. In his article With no photo IDs, nuns denied ballots in Indiana primary, Gordon continued to rely on Borkowski, who referred to the "supreme irony" of the situation:

"This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can’t be accepted by a bunch of nuns ... who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don’t have an ID."

Gordon continues, acknowledging that it was not only the nuns who were disenfranchised:

At least six other people also were relegated to filing provisional ballots at the polling place on the ground floor of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, said Amy Smessaert, a spokeswoman for the convent.

Among them was Lauren McCallick, an 18-year-old freshman at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, who said she got "teary-eyed" and then angry at being rejected the first time she was old enough to vote.

The article also quoted National Campaign Director Jonah Goldman:

"The nuns and this young woman are the face of the Supreme Court case," said Jonah Goldman, who directs the Lawyers Committee’s Campaign for Fair Elections. He said his group, which has bird-dogged polling places in primaries across the country over the last three months, also has found widespread confusion in other states over voter identification requirements.
 
"We’ve seen people in every contest that we’ve covered being disenfranchised by a perceived, incorrect or illegal restrictive identification requirement," partly because some poll workers have demanded more identification than was required by law, Goldman said.

Click here to read Gordon’s article.