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

by Carol Anderson

The NAACP and ACLU countered that the state’s numbers, study, and analysis were inaccurate and full-blown misrepresentations. For example, the fact that supposedly 1 percent did not have an ID was “hardly negligible” because that was 43,000 citizens. But, it was much worse than that, they argued. A recent survey of Indiana voters “found that approximately 16% of all voting eligible residents did not have either a current license or state identification card and 13% of current registered voters did not have licenses or identification cards.” In fact, a subsequent study found that in Indiana, “white citizens were 11.5 percentage points more likely than black citizens to have the accepted credentials to vote.” The situation was exacerbated by the state’s “Byzantine requirements imposed on persons attempting to obtain identification from the BMV [Bureau of Motor Vehicles] … In a given week 60% of applicants for licenses or state identification cards are turned away because they fail to have the appropriate documents mandated by the BMV.” In other words, the state’s offer of “free ID” was a brilliant smokescreen that masked that the actual documents required to obtain an Indiana driver’s license or state identification were not so easy to get and often came with costs borne solely by the would-be voter. The NAACP and ACLU noted, for example, that a birth certificate was necessary to get a driver’s license, but in an obvious “Catch-22 of classic proportions” in Marion County, wh...