GA judge throws out ID voting law

The fate of Georgia's law requiring that citizens have a photo ID to vote -- pushed hard by Gov. Sonny Perdue and the state legislature to go into effect before the fall elections -- suffered its latest setback yesterday, reports the New York Times:

A state judge ruled Tuesday that a Georgia law requiring voters to present government-issued photo identification violates the State Constitution and could not be enforced.

In issuing a permanent injunction against the latest version of the Voter ID Act, the judge, T. Jackson Bedford Jr. of Fulton County Superior Court, said legislators overstepped their authority when they imposed a condition on the right to vote by requiring a photo ID.

"Nowhere in the Constitution is the legislature authorized to deny a registered voter the right to vote on any other ground, including a possession of a photo ID," he wrote.

Judge Bedford wrote he was particularly troubled by a provision in the law that allows a registered voter without an approved photo ID to cast a ballot on Election Day but says that vote would not be counted unless the voter returned with an ID within two days.

"The result of this provisional-ballot scheme," he wrote, "is to disenfranchise an otherwise qualified voter who does not comply with the additional conditions imposed by the legislature."

The times quotes a voting expert who echoes what many feel the bill is about:

"This is really a vote-suppression measure," said Daniel Tokaji, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and an expert on election law.

"There's very little evidence for the proposition that people are going to the polling place and pretending to be someone else." Mr. Tokaji said