One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

The Supreme Court didn’t see it that way. The majority of justices had imbibed the tonic of voter fraud and saw before them the hallucination of ne’er-do-wells in the cities stealing elections and undermining democracy. The court recognized, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, that the “only kind of voter fraud that SEA 483 addresses is in-person voter impersonation at polling places.” And, he was forced to admit, that the “record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.” That easily should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Instead, he continued, “flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country … have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists.” He then pulled out the story of New York City’s William “Boss” Tweed from an 1868 election. That was followed by a swan dive into the fictional swamp of St. Louis’s canine and dead voters.59 Not only did the court swallow whole the myth of rampant voter fraud, but equally important, the justices could not fathom that something as simple as needing an ID constituted any type of overwhelming burden—especially because Indiana offered to provide the driver’s license or state ID for free.