Progress Illinois

In a surprise decision yesterday, an Indiana state appellate court overturned a controversial law that requires voters to show photo identification at the polls, claiming it violated the Indiana Constitution. Specifically, the three-judge panel unanimously ruled that by exempting mail-in absentee voters and residents of state-licensed care facilities from the requirement, the law violated the state's equal protection clause because it was not applied in a "uniform and impartial" manner.

Critics like Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels have slammed the decision as politically-motivated and have said they expect the Indiana Supreme Court to reverse it. But what Daniels and supporters of the law seem to ignore, and which the court ostensibly recognizes, is that the law itself is politically-motivated. Voter fraud is not a problem in Indiana, just as it is not a problem anywhere else in the country. After devoting substantial resources to combating this purported scourge, the Justice Department under President Bush failed to turn up any substantive evidence that widespread "fraud" exists. Before the election last year, conservative officials in Indiana -- aided and abetted by a deeply uninformed media -- raised concerns about potential voter fraud. Yet again, no evidence turned up of any coordinated effort to steal the election there. Indeed, Indiana's voter ID law is a solution to a problem that simply doesn't exist. All it does is place an extra burden on certain voters (many of them Democrat-leaning). From the New York Times' article today:

But Daniel P. Tokaji, an associate professor at Moritz College of Law, at Ohio State University, said the Indiana Constitution “does indeed provide broader protection for voting rights” than the federal Constitution. Professor Tokaji suggested that the judges did not believe that the law, adopted by a Republican-controlled legislature, was really intended to reduce voter fraud.

The ruling should also serve as a warning to any Illinois Republicans who, like last year, may be pondering a voter ID law of their own.

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President Obama’s executive order to shut down the unlawful Guantanamo Bay detention camp within a year has Republicans nationwide asking one question: where are we going to house the detainees? As you can see above, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart offered the appropriate response to GOP hand-wringing over Guantanamo’s shuttering last week. Now, a coterie of Indiana state senators are taking it one step further, authoring a Senate resolutiont that urges Obama not to send any detainees to the federal prison in Terre Haute. From the Indianapolis Star:

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Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita really wants Hoosiers to believe he cares deeply about the integrity of the voting process. In October, just days before the 2008 election, the Republican sent a letter to federal, state, and local authorities asking for a criminal investigation into over 1,400 suspicious voter registration forms submitted by the group ACORN in Lake County. Despite convincing evidence to the contrary, he claimed (PDF) that ACORN was undertaking a massive voter fraud campaign that would “dilute the voice of honest voters and render an inaccurate tally on Election Day.”

Maybe Rokita should have spent less time demonizing community groups and more time ensuring all Indiana residents have access to the polls. In the run-up to the election, we thoroughly documented how Rokita stood idly by while a legitimate voter suppression battle developed in Lake County. Now the voting rights group Project Vote has accused him of failing to guarantee that Indiana is in compliance with the national Motor Voter law:

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Of all the surprises to emerge from the 2008 electoral map, Barack Obama's victory in Indiana has to be the sweetest.  And most impressive.  Every single county in the state shifted towards the Democratic candidate on Tuesday (compared to 2004), leading him to a 26,000-vote margin of victory. 

Of all the red states won back by the Democrats on Tuesday, Indiana represented the steepest climb.  In 2004, George W. Bush had won the Hoosier State by over 510,000 votes -- a greater margin than in any of the other states turned blue by Obama this week:

So how did the Democrats knock off the Hoosier State? 

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- All day long, volunteers flooded into the Obama headquarters in Gary, coming from Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.  By the time I arrived there in the late afternoon, staff were redirecting people to Portage County.

- The walls of the Gary headquarters were littered with precinct maps.  The office itself was jammed with about two dozen people, all of them hitting the phones.

- Polling places in the city weren't at all crowded, but residents expected lines to form as the 6 pm closing time approached.

- During the 5 o'clock hour, I visited two quiet polling places in Hammond and another in Munster.  All said they'd seen record turnout over the course of the day, the bulk of it in the morning.

- I asked one tired looking Obama volunteer, "Are you running on steam at this point?" Her response, "No, hope!"

Yesterday, John McCain made a brief pitstop in Indianapolis.  But today, after voting this morning in Chicago, Barack Obama headed across the border for one last appearance, his 49th stop in the Hoosier State since the campaign began:

"I think we can win Indiana, otherwise I wouldn't be in Indiana," Obama told a reporter at an Indianapolis union hall this morning. Indianapolis was his only campaign stop outside of Illinois today.

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In a last-minute attempt to shore up support in the Hoosier State, John McCain is going to make a pit-stop at the Indianapolis airport tomorrow:

Republican Sen. John McCain will make his first Indiana campaign stop in more than four months -- a rally at the Indianapolis airport Monday afternoon, the day before voters choose the nation's next president. [...]

Despite the unusual closeness of the race, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters in a conference call Friday morning that "we love the results of the campaign we have going on there."

He cited a poll by Rasmussen, released this week, that showed McCain with a 3 percentage-point lead, a statistical dead heat given the poll's margin of error.

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Today, the Indiana Court of Appeals put the final nail in the coffin of the Republican efforts to obstruct early voting access in the Democratic-leaning cities of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago.  The court upheld Superior Court Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider's ruling that the opening of the early voting centers in these three areas violated state law. From the Indianapolis Star:

The court in an unanimous decision upheld a special judge's ruling last week that the satellite in-person absentee voting centers should remain open. The Democrat-controlled Lake County election board had authorized the centers, but Republicans protested.

The Court of Appeals rejected Republican arguments that state law required an unanimous decision by the election board to open the satellite centers.

So that's that.  Now, what's going on in Marion County?

As is the case nationwide, early voting has proven quite popular in Lake County, Indiana. Chicago Public Radio points out that lines at all four of the county's voting sites have lasted up to four hours. To compensate, the county election board has approved a plan to extend the early voting period an extra three days -- through his weekend until noon on Monday. A no-brainer, right? Not for the board's two sitting Republicans, both of whom voted against the extension, proving yet again that the Lake County GOP is primarily concerned about obstructing ballot access in the Democratic-leaning region of the county.

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Meet Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita. By now, you might know him as the Republican official who stood idly by while a legitimate voter suppression battle developed in Lake County. He then promised to conduct a criminal investigation into the suspicious voter registration forms submitted by ACORN in the same county, despite no evidence suggesting the organization itself purposefully committed fraud. While his election-season behavior is frustrating, it shouldn't be shocking.

As Talking Points Memo noted, in a 2002 South Bend Tribune article pulled from Nexus, Rokita spoke fondly of his experience preventing a recount in Florida during the 2000 election:

Working on his own time, [Rokita] also assisted George W. Bush's campaign during the infamous Florida election recount in 2000. Rokita is proud of that, especially because the U.S. Supreme Court cited Indiana election law when it decided the election in Bush's favor.

But here's the real doozy.

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