by James Oliphant
The fact that Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the controlling opinion in Monday's landmark ruling upholding Indiana's Voter ID law has been noted with interest by more than one high court-watcher.
After all, the last time the justices took on a high-stakes partisan election case, in Bush v. Gore, the case that in essence awarded the presidency to George W. Bush, Stevens wrote an impassioned dissent:
What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.
Strong stuff. But one one level, his approach was consistent. In both cases, he said states should be free to conduct their elections largely how they see fit.
But what about the other part of the Voter ID holding, in which the majority saw no need for Indiana to provide any evidence that voter fraud actually exists? Stevens, and the other five justices who comprised the majority, seemed to simply take it on faith that shenanigans at the ballot box occur.
Could the 88-year-old justice have been influenced by coming of age in his hometown of Chicago? He was born there in 1920 and worked there as a lawyer and judge until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1975.
He was also a Republican in a town famous for the Cook County Democratic machine, led by Mayor Richard J. Daley and others. He would have had a front-row seat, for instance, in 1960, in which the GOP claimed that Daley "found" thousands of votes of dead people to throw the presidential election in favor of John F. Kennedy and helped cheat Richard Nixon out of the White House. Probes were launched but they were inconclusive.
Here's a passage from a Slate article from 2000 about the controversy:
The GOP's failure to prove fraud doesn't mean, of course, that the election was clean. That question remains unsolved and unsolvable. But what's typically left out of the legend is that multiple election boards saw no reason to overturn the results. Neither did state or federal judges. Neither did an Illinois special prosecutor in 1961. And neither have academic inquiries into the Illinois case (both a 1961 study by three University of Chicago professors and more recent research by political scientist Edmund Kallina concluded that whatever fraud existed wasn't substantial enough to alter the election).
On the other hand, some fraud clearly occurred in Cook County. At least three people were sent to jail for election-related crimes, and 677 others were indicted before being acquitted by Judge John M. Karns, a Daley crony. Many of the allegations involved practices that wouldn't be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune, among others, to conclude that "once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen." What's more, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was rightfully Nixon's. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI's findings to the attorney general--as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy--he effectively buried the case.
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Comments
pure speculation where is the proof he did it should not bother anybody to show proof of who they are unless they have a hidden agenda
Posted by: show me | April 29, 2008 10:13 AM
Oliphant, typically, ignores the federal court orders that found "widespread corruption" in the 1982 Chicago elections. There is DOCUMENTED evidence in that case that the lack of identification was used for absentee ballot fraud, was used to allow illegal immigrants to vote, and was also used to disenfranchise people in assisted living facilities who had their votes taken from them by ward bosses and other partisan election workers.
In 1960 Nixon did the right thing and conceded unlike Gore who dragged the whole mess into the courts. It would've been nigh impossible to figure out who won the 1960 election as the Slate article clearly states.
Indiana is doing the right thing, why wait for Illinois-style fraud to exist when you can stamp it out proactively? And why are the democrats so dead-set against stamping out said fraud?
Posted by: Jeff | April 29, 2008 10:57 AM
This decision is ridiculous. The Republicans have documentation that they do this as a strategy to suppress the vote, as only lower income, non-drivers, will be affected for the most part (what part of burden don't the Supreme Court's pre-biased elite not understand). To rule on this as if it were intended for legal purposes only is absurd, just as absurd as the 2000 decision to give the presidency to the frat boy.
Posted by: Fred Fep | April 29, 2008 11:04 AM
Posted by: Jeff | April 29, 2008 10:57 AM
If your going to give credit to one of your heros, Nixon, then also give it to Kerry, who could have taken the Ohio vote to court in '04, but decided to concede.
Posted by: syj | April 29, 2008 12:02 PM
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Posted by: Fred Fep | April 29, 2008 11:04 AM
Fred,
Did you even read the Supreme Court's opinion? Lower income non-drivers can get an Indiana ID card for FREE. That's one of the reasons the Court said the law did not impose any more than ordinary burdens that affect everyone.
Furthermore, contrary to the rhetoric flying around here, there was much more than the potential for fraud at stake. There are federal laws which require States to modernize and clean up their election procedures. Indiana was or is in the stone age in this regard. It had to do something to curb the problem with the bloated, inaccurate voter rolls. You should read the opinion before you pass judgment.
Posted by: John W. | April 29, 2008 12:03 PM
And the Republicans had stolen offices in downstate Illinois that they wanted to keep and that is why they didn't squeel on Nixon's behalf on what had happened in the Presidential race in the northern part of this crappy state.
Posted by: Fraud all around | April 29, 2008 12:13 PM
"And why are the democrats so dead-set against stamping out said fraud?"
Posted by: Jeff | April 29, 2008 10:57 AM
Because they'd rather win. When you don't have ideas, the next best way to win is to adopt the Cook County, IL election model. (Where Oprahma cut his political teeth, by the way.)
Posted by: MJ | April 29, 2008 1:18 PM
I'd be a little more comfortable with Republican enthusiasm for these voter-ID laws if there were some commensurate concern about the rise of hackable, nonverifiable electronic voting in which the software itself is not open to public inspection because it's proprietary. That's right, folks, we've privatized the core process of democracy. That, it seems to me, is the mother lode of vote fraud in the 21st century. But move along, folks, nothing to see here ...
Posted by: rastewart | April 29, 2008 1:35 PM
I find the ruling discouraging because the justices show themselves to be out of touch with the lives of every day Americans. The fact that people can avoid the voter ID rules by simply filing for an absentee ballot says to me that the stated intention of stopping voter fraud can not be the reason for the law. Why someone going to the polls is subjected to a higher level of scrutiny than someone voting at home where the signature is not witnessed by election officials is incomprehensible to me.
A footnote in the opinion by Alito, Scalia and Thomas that a poll tax if applied equally might be constitutional certainly substantiates that we need to clarify in the constitution what one man, one vote means since that concept seems too complex for the three justices.
Rulings such as these which could be interpreted as discriminatory against the poor could easily and understandably be misinterpreted as racially motivated by the likes of Rev Wright.
Posted by: Ron M | April 29, 2008 2:20 PM