US SUPREME COURT DECISIONS

III

Because the lead opinion finds only “limited” burdens on the right to vote, see ante, at 18, it avoids a hard look at the State’s claimed interests. See ante, at 7–13. But having found the Voter ID Law burdens far from trivial, I have to make a rigorous assessment of “ ‘the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule,’ [and] ‘the extent to which those interests make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights.’ ” Burdick, 504 U. S., at 434 (quoting Anderson, 460 U. S., at 789).

As this quotation from Burdick indicates, the interests claimed to justify the regulatory scheme are subject to discount in two distinct ways. First, the generalities raised by the State have to be shaved down to the precise “aspect[s of claimed interests] addressed by the law at issue.” California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U. S. 567, 584 (2000) (emphasis omitted); see ibid. (scrutiny of state interests “is not to be made in the abstract, by asking whether [the interests] are highly significant values; but rather by asking whether the aspect of [those interests] addressed by the law at issue is highly significant” (emphasis in original)). And even if the State can show particularized interests addressed by the law, those interests are subject to further discount depending on “the extent to which [they] make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights.” Burdick, supra, at 434 (internal quotation marks omitted).

As the lead opinion sees it, the State has offered four related concerns that suffice to justify the Voter ID Law: modernizing election procedures, combating voter fraud, addressing the consequences of the State’s bloated voter rolls, and protecting public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process. See ante, at 7–13. On closer look, however, it appears that the first two (which are really just one) can claim modest weight at best, and the latter two if anything weaken the State’s case.

A

The lead opinion’s discussion of the State’s reasons begins with the State’s asserted interests in “election modernization,” ante, at 8–10, and in combating voter fraud, see ante, at 11–13. Although these are given separate headings, any line drawn between them is unconvincing; as I understand it, the “effort to modernize elections,” Brief for Respondents in No. 07–25, p. 12, is not for modernity’s sake, but to reach certain practical (or political) objectives. [Footnote 27] In any event, if a proposed modernization were in fact aimless, if it were put forward as change for change’s sake, a State could not justify any appreciable burden on the right to vote that might ensue; useless technology has no constitutional value. And in fact that is not the case here. The State says that it adopted the ID law principally to combat voter fraud, and it is this claim, not the slogan of “election modernization,” that warrants attention.

1

There is no denying the abstract importance, the compelling nature, of combating voter fraud. See Purcell, 549 U. S., at 4 (acknowledging “the State’s compelling interest in preventing voter fraud”); cf. Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Comm., 489 U. S. 214, 231 (1989) (“A State indisputably has a compelling interest in preserving the integrity of its election process”). But it takes several steps to get beyond the level of abstraction here.

To begin with, requiring a voter to show photo identification before casting a regular ballot addresses only one form of voter fraud: in-person voter impersonation. The photo ID requirement leaves untouched the problems of absentee-ballot fraud, which (unlike in-person voter impersonation) is a documented problem in Indiana, see 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 793; of registered voters voting more than once (but maintaining their own identities) in different counties or in different States; of felons and other disqualified individuals voting in their own names; of vote buying; or, for that matter, of ballot-stuffing, ballot miscounting, voter intimidation, or any other type of corruption on the part of officials administering elections. See Brief for Brennan Center for Justice et al. as Amici Curiae 7.

And even the State’s interest in deterring a voter from showing up at the polls and claiming to be someone he is not must, in turn, be discounted for the fact that the State has not come across a single instance of in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Indiana’s history. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 792–793; see also ante, at 11–13 (lead opinion). Neither the District Court nor the Indiana General Assembly that passed the Voter ID Law was given any evidence whatsoever of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the State. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 793. This absence of support is consistent with the experience of several veteran poll watchers in Indiana, each of whom submitted testimony in the District Court that he had never witnessed an instance of attempted voter impersonation fraud at the polls. Ibid. It is also consistent with the dearth of evidence of in-person voter impersonation in any other part of the country. See ante, at 11, n. 11 (lead opinion) (conceding that there are at most “scattered instances of in-person voter fraud”); see also Brief for Brennan Center for Justice, supra, at 11–25, 25 (demonstrating that “the national evidence—including the very evidence relied on by the courts below—suggests that the type of voting fraud that may be remedied by a photo ID requirement is virtually nonexistent: the ‘problem’ of voter impersonation is not a real problem at all”). [Footnote 28].

The State responds to the want of evidence with the assertion that in-person voter impersonation fraud is hard to detect. But this is like saying the “man who wasn’t there” is hard to spot, [Footnote 29] and to know whether difficulty in detection accounts for the lack of evidence one at least has to ask whether in-person voter impersonation is (or would be) relatively harder to ferret out than other kinds of fraud (e.g., by absentee ballot) which the State has had no trouble documenting. The answer seems to be no; there is reason to think that “impersonation of voters is … the most likely type of fraud to be discovered.” U. S. Election Assistance Commission, Election Crimes: An Initial Review and Recommendations for Future Study 9 (Dec. 2006), http://www.eac.gov/clearinghouse/docs/reports-and-surveys-2006electioncrimes.pdf/attachment_download/file (hereinafter EAC Report). This is in part because an individual who impersonates another at the polls commits his fraud in the open, under the scrutiny of local poll workers who may well recognize a fraudulent voter when they hear who he claims to be. See Brief for Respondents in No. 07–21, p. 6 (“[P]recinct workers may recognize an imposter, and precinct election workers have the authority to challenge persons appearing to vote if the election board member ‘is not satisfied that a person who offers to vote is the person who the person represents the person to be’ ” (quoting Ind. Code Ann. §3–11–8–27 (West 2006))).

The relative ease of discovering in-person voter impersonation is also owing to the odds that any such fraud will be committed by “organized groups such as campaigns or political parties” rather than by individuals acting alone. L. Minnite & D. Callahan, Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Election Fraud 14 (2003). It simply is not worth it for individuals acting alone to commit in-person voter impersonation, which is relatively ineffectual for the foolish few who may commit it. If an imposter gets caught, he is subject to severe criminal penalties. See, e.g., Ind. Code Ann. §3–14–2–9 (making it a felony “knowingly [to] vot[e] or offe[r] to vote at an election when the person is not registered or authorized to vote”); §3–14–2–11 (with certain exceptions, “a person who knowingly votes or offers to vote in a precinct except the one in which the person is registered and resides” commits a felony); §3–14–2–12(1) (making it a felony “knowingly [to] vot[e] or mak[e] application to vote in an election in a name other than the person’s own”); §3–14–2–12(2) (a person who, “having voted once at an election, knowingly applies to vote at the same election in the person’s own name or any other name” commits a felony); see also 42 U. S. C. §1973i(e)(1) (any individual who “votes more than once” in certain federal elections “shall be fined not more than ,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both”). And even if he succeeds, the imposter gains nothing more than one additional vote for his candidate. See EAC Report 9 (in-person voter impersonation “is an inefficient method of influencing an election”); J. Levitt, The Truth about Voter Fraud 7 (2007) (“[F]raud by individual voters is a singularly foolish and ineffective way to attempt to win an election. Each act of voter fraud in connection with a federal election risks five years in prison and a ,000 fine, in addition to any state penalties. In return, it yields at most one incremental vote. That single extra vote is simply not worth the price” (footnote omitted)); cf. 472 F. 3d, at 951 (“[A] vote in a political election rarely has any instrumental value, since elections for political office at the state or federal level are never decided by just one vote” (emphasis in original)).

In sum, fraud by individuals acting alone, however difficult to detect, is unlikely. And while there may be greater incentives for organized groups to engage in broad-gauged in-person voter impersonation fraud, see Minnite & Callahan, supra, at 20, it is also far more difficult to conceal larger enterprises of this sort. The State’s argument about the difficulty of detecting the fraud lacks real force.

2

Nothing else the State has to say does much to bolster its case. The State argues, for example, that even without evidence of in-person voter impersonation in Indiana, it is enough for the State to show that “opportunities [for such fraud] are transparently obvious in elections without identification checks,” Brief for Respondents in No. 07–25, p. 54. Of course they are, but Indiana elections before the Voter ID Law were not run “without identification checks”; on the contrary, as the Marion County Election Board informs us, “[t]ime-tested systems were in place to detect in-person voter impersonation fraud before the challenged statute was enacted,” Brief for Respondents in No. 07–21, p. 6. These included hiring poll workers who were precinct residents familiar with the neighborhood, and making signature comparisons, each effort being supported by the criminal provisions mentioned before. Id., at 6–8.

For that matter, the deterrence argument can do only so much work, since photo identification is itself hardly a failsafe against impersonation. Indiana knows this, and that is why in 2007 the State began to issue redesigned driver’s licenses with digital watermarking. [Footnote 30] The State has made this shift precisely because, in the words of its BMV, “visual inspection is not adequate to determine the authenticity” of driver’s licenses. See Indiana BMV, supra, n. 30. Indeed, the BMV explains that the digital watermarks (which can be scanned using equipment that, so far, Indiana does not use at polling places) is needed to “tak[e] the guesswork out of inspection.” Ibid. [Footnote 31] So, at least until polling places have the machines and special software to scan the new driver’s licenses, and until all the licenses with the older designs expire (the licenses issued after 2006 but before the 2007 redesigning are good until 2012, see 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 791), Indiana’s law does no more than assure that any in-person voter fraud will take place with fake IDs, not attempted signature forgery.

Despite all this, I will readily stipulate that a State has an interest in responding to the risk (however small) of in-person voter impersonation. See ante, at 12 (lead opinion). I reach this conclusion, like others accepted by the Court, because “ ‘[w]here a legislature has significantly greater institutional expertise, as, for example, in the field of election regulation, the Court in practice defers to empirical legislative judgments.’ ” Randall, 548 U. S., at 285 (Souter, J., dissenting) (quoting Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U. S. 377, 402 (2000) (Breyer, J., concurring)). Weight is owed to the legislative judgment as such. But the ultimate valuation of the particular interest a State asserts has to take account of evidence against it as well as legislative judgments for it (certainly when the law is one of the most restrictive of its kind, see n. 26, supra), and on this record it would be unreasonable to accord this assumed state interest more than very modest significance. [Footnote 32]

3

The antifraud rationale is open to skepticism on one further ground, what Burdick spoke of as an assessment of the degree of necessity for the State’s particular course of action. Two points deserve attention, the first being that the State has not even tried to justify its decision to implement the photo identification requirement immediately on passage of the new law. A phase-in period would have given the State time to distribute its newly designed licenses, and to make a genuine effort to get them to individuals in need, and a period for transition is exactly what the Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Carter and former Secretary of State Baker, recommended in its report. See Building Confidence in U. S. Elections §2.5 (Sept. 2005), App. 136, 140 (hereinafter Carter-Baker Report) (“For the next two federal elections, until January 1, 2010, in states that require voters to present ID at the polls, voters who fail to do so should nonetheless be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, and their ballot would count if their signature is verified”). During this phase-in period, the report said, States would need to make “efforts to ensure that all voters are provided convenient opportunities to obtain” the required identification. Id., at 141. The former President and former Secretary of State explained this recommendation in an op-ed essay:

“Yes, we are concerned about the approximately 12 percent of citizens who lack a driver’s license. So we proposed that states finally assume the responsibility to seek out citizens to both register voters and provide them with free ID’s that meet federal standards. States should open new offices, use social service agencies and deploy mobile offices to register voters. By connecting ID’s to registration, voting participation will be expanded.” Carter & Baker, Voting Reform is in the Cards, N. Y. Times, Sept. 23, 2005, p. A19.

Although Indiana claims to have adopted its ID requirement relying partly on the Carter-Baker Report, see Brief for Respondents in No. 07–25, pp. 5, 13, 49; see also ante, at 10 (lead opinion), the State conspicuously rejected the Report’s phase-in recommendation aimed at reducing the burdens on the right to vote, and just as conspicuously fails even to try to explain why.

What is left of the State’s claim must be downgraded further for one final reason: regardless of the interest the State may have in adopting a photo identification requirement as a general matter, that interest in no way necessitates the particular burdens the Voter ID Law imposes on poor people and religious objectors. Individuals unable to get photo identification are forced to travel to the county seat every time they wish to exercise the franchise, and they have to get there within 10 days of the election. See supra, at 8–10. Nothing about the State’s interest in fighting voter fraud justifies this requirement of a post-election trip to the county seat instead of some verification process at the polling places.

In briefing this Court, the State responds by pointing to an interest in keeping lines at polling places short. See Brief for Respondents in No. 07–25, p. 58. It warns that “[i]f election workers—a scarce resource in any election—must attend to the details of validating provisional ballots, voters may have to wait longer to vote,” and it assures us that “[n]othing deters voting so much as long lines at the polls.” Ibid. But this argument fails on its own terms, for whatever might be the number of individuals casting a provisional ballot, the State could simply allow voters to sign the indigency affidavit at the polls subject to review there after the election. [Footnote 33] After all, the Voter ID Law already requires voters lacking photo identification to sign, at the polling site, an affidavit attesting to proper registration. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 786.

Indeed, the State’s argument more than fails; it backfires, in implicitly conceding that a not-insignificant number of individuals will need to rely on the burdensome provisional-ballot mechanism. What is more, as the District Court found, the Voter ID Law itself actually increases the likelihood of delay at the polls. Since any minor discrepancy between a voter’s photo identification card and the registration information may lead to a challenge, “the opportunities for presenting challenges ha[ve] increased as a result of the photo identification requirements.” Id., at 789; cf. 472 F. 3d, at 955 (Evans, J., dissenting) (“The potential for mischief with this law is obvious. Does the name on the ID ‘conform’ to the name on the voter registration list? If the last name of a newly married woman is on the ID but her maiden name is on the registration list, does it conform? If a name is misspelled on one—Schmit versus Schmitt—does it conform? If a ‘Terence’ appears on one and a shortened ‘Terry’ on the other, does it conform?”).

B

The State’s asserted interests in modernizing elections and combating fraud are decidedly modest; at best, they fail to offset the clear inference that thousands of Indiana citizens will be discouraged from voting. The two remaining justifications, meanwhile, actually weaken the State’s case.

The lead opinion agrees with the State that “the inflation of its voter rolls is further support for its enactment of” the Voter ID Law. Ante, at 12. This is a puzzling conclusion, given the fact, which the lead opinion notes, that the National Government filed a complaint against Indiana, containing this allegation:

“Indiana has failed to conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to identify and remove ineligible voters from the State’s registration list; has failed to remove such ineligible voters; and has failed to engage in oversight actions sufficient to ensure that local election jurisdictions identify and remove such ineligible voters.” App. 309, 312.

The Federal Government and the State agreed to settle the case, and a consent decree and order have been entered, see ante, at 12–13, requiring Indiana to fulfill its list-maintenance obligations under §8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, 107 Stat. 82, 42 U. S. C. §1973gg–6.

How any of this can justify restrictions on the right to vote is difficult to say. The State is simply trying to take advantage of its own wrong: if it is true that the State’s fear of in-person voter impersonation fraud arises from its bloated voter checklist, the answer to the problem is in the State’s own hands. The claim that the State has an interest in addressing a symptom of the problem (alleged impersonation) rather than the problem itself (the negligently maintained bloated rolls) is thus self-defeating; it shows that the State has no justifiable need to burden the right to vote as it does, and it suggests that the State is not as serious about combating fraud as it claims to be. [Footnote 34].

The State’s final justification, its interest in safeguarding voter confidence, similarly collapses. The problem with claiming this interest lies in its connection to the bloated voter rolls; the State has come up with nothing to suggest that its citizens doubt the integrity of the State’s electoral process, except its own failure to maintain its rolls. The answer to this problem is not to burden the right to vote, but to end the official negligence.

It should go without saying that none of this is to deny States’ legitimate interest in safeguarding public confidence. The Court has, for example, recognized that fighting perceptions of political corruption stemming from large political contributions is a legitimate and substantial state interest, underlying not only campaign finance laws, but bribery and antigratuity statutes as well. See Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U. S. 377, 390 (2000). But the force of the interest depends on the facts (or plausibility of the assumptions) said to justify invoking it. See id., at 391 (“The quantum of empirical evidence needed to satisfy heightened judicial scrutiny of legislative judgments will vary up or down with the novelty and plausibility of the justification raised”). While we found in Nixon that “there is little reason to doubt that sometimes large contributions will work actual corruption of our political system, and no reason to question the existence of a corresponding suspicion among voters,” id., at 395, there is plenty of reason to be doubtful here, both about the reality and the perception. It is simply not plausible to assume here, with no evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud in a State, and very little of it nationwide, that a public perception of such fraud is nevertheless “inherent” in an election system providing severe criminal penalties for fraud and mandating signature checks at the polls. Cf. id., at 390 (“[T]he perception of corruption [is] ‘inherent in a regime of large individual financial contributions’ to candidates for public office” (quoting Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 27 (1976) (per curiam)).

C

Without a shred of evidence that in-person voter impersonation is a problem in the State, much less a crisis, Indiana has adopted one of the most restrictive photo identification requirements in the country. The State recognizes that tens of thousands of qualified voters lack the necessary federally issued or state-issued identification, but it insists on implementing the requirement immediately, without allowing a transition period for targeted efforts to distribute the required identification to individuals who need it. The State hardly even tries to explain its decision to force indigents or religious objectors to travel all the way to their county seats every time they wish to vote, and if there is any waning of confidence in the administration of elections it probably owes more to the State’s violation of federal election law than to any imposters at the polling places. It is impossible to say, on this record, that the State’s interest in adopting its signally inhibiting photo identification requirement has been shown to outweigh the serious burdens it imposes on the right to vote.

If more were needed to condemn this law, our own precedent would provide it, for the calculation revealed in the Indiana statute crosses a line when it targets the poor and the weak. Cf. Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, 793 (1983) (“[I]t is especially difficult for the State to justify a restriction that limits political participation by an identifiable political group whose members share a particular viewpoint, associational preference, or economic status”). If the Court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections, 383 U. S. 663 (1966), stands for anything, it is that being poor has nothing to do with being qualified to vote. Harper made clear that “[t]o introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter’s qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor.” Id., at 668. The State’s requirements here, that people without cars travel to a motor vehicle registry and that the poor who fail to do that get to their county seats within 10 days of every election, likewise translate into unjustified economic burdens uncomfortably close to the outright .50 fee we struck down 42 years ago. Like that fee, the onus of the Indiana law is illegitimate just because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise.

*  *  *

The Indiana Voter ID Law is thus unconstitutional: the state interests fail to justify the practical limitations placed on the right to vote, and the law imposes an unreasonable and irrelevant burden on voters who are poor and old. I would vacate the judgment of the Seventh Circuit, and remand for further proceedings.