Senate passes photo ID bill
Published 4:15 pm Saturday, March 24, 2012
ST. PAUL — The Minnesota Legislature has agreed to let voters choose in November if they want a voter photo ID requirement in the state constitution, but some political groups have vowed to challenge the amendment in court before it even reaches the ballot.
The full Senate passed the proposed constitutional amendment 36-30 Friday. It would require a voter to present a photo ID at the polls. The House passed the amendment earlier in the week.
Much of the debate Friday night centered on the system of provisional balloting that the amendment would set up. Provisional ballots could be cast by those who register without ID on Election Day, but wouldn’t count unless a voter returned to confirm his or her identity.
Democrats said this system would be costly and time-consuming and could lead to many votes going uncounted.
Lawmakers widely supported one amendment to the bill that expands the ID definition to a photo ID “or equivalent,” to provide for future ID technology.
A few amendments that failed were offered to create exemptions from the photo ID requirement for veterans, college students and those in nursing homes. Republicans said exemptions should not go into the amendment but could be considered in enacting legislation. Democrats countered that legislation could not override constitutional language that is “cast in stone.”
Mike Dean, executive director of the group Common Cause of Minnesota, said his organization has been working with state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters to coordinate efforts on a lawsuit that goes after the ballot question’s wording.
“The language being provided to voters is extremely confusing and it’s unclear what it really means,” Dean said.
Laura Fredrick-Wang, executive director of the League of Women Voters Minnesota, said they are concerned with the “wording of the amendment not necessarily addressing the scope of what the law could do.”
Fredrick-Wang said that the amendment question doesn’t address what types of photo IDs would be permissible at the polls. She said it also doesn’t mention the use of provisional ballots.
Pro-voter ID groups have dismissed those complaints as frivolous and politically motivated, and have pointed out that the Legislature would ultimately work out details that aren’t in the amendment. Dan McGrath, executive director of Minnesota Majority, said the complaint of vague wording wouldn’t hold up in court.
“If you look at previous constitutional amendments in the state of Minnesota, the ballot question essentially has to be one sentence, you can’t really explain in great detail,” McGrath said. “I don’t think it’s a legitimate complaint.”
But such a technical challenge succeeded in a case before the Florida Supreme Court in 2010, said Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow with the National Conference of State Legislatures. The court struck three proposed amendments from the ballot by ruling that the questions were confusing to voters.
“It’s very common to see challenges on a ballot measure before the election on the grounds that the title (and summary) of the measure doesn’t necessarily represent the content of the measure,” Bowser said.
In 2006, the Minnesota Supreme Court heard a similar complaint about confusing wording in an amendment to dedicate tax dollars to transportation. Ultimately, the court allowed it to go on the ballot.
Bowser said those complaints weren’t made in either Mississippi or Oklahoma, two other states where voter ID made it onto a ballot as a proposed constitutional amendment.
A more typical complaint against voter ID measures comes under the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting policies that discriminate on the basis of race or minority status, said Justin Levitt, an election law expert and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Dean said his group may also consider a complaint of voter disenfranchisement.
The League of Women Voters has already brought such a suit in Wisconsin, and a circuit court judge ruled that a photo ID requirement would prevent constitutionally eligible voters from voting.
Several states —mostly in the South — with histories of discrimination fall under a special Voting Rights Act section that makes voting laws subject to approval by the U.S. Department of Justice or a judicial panel in Washington, D.C. Two states under that provision, Texas and South Carolina, were recently denied approval of their newly passed photo ID laws.
Levitt said courts measure disenfranchisement by how much a voting law burdens minority voters relative to other voters. The effect on minority voters “may be totally different in Minnesota than it is in Texas,” he said.
The lead senator on the amendment, Sen. Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, said the ACLU and League of Women Voters had told him they would sue.
“I’m not concerned at all,” Newman said. “That’s their legal right.”