Supreme Court Review.

A year ago, the sheer number of 5-4 decisions garnered the most attention with regard to the 2006-07 Supreme Court term. Twenty-four of that term's 72 cases were decided by this narrowest of margins. By contrast, the 2007-08 term was perhaps most remarkable in the unexpected coalitions of justices that decided the most controversial cases. During the previous term, many of these controversial cases had come down to a "conservative" bloc (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas) vs." liberal" bloc (Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens) scenario that left Justice Kennedy as the sole swing vote. However, the most recent term featured a number of unexpected bedfellows, sometimes even in those cases that were most divisive. Voter ID Laws For example, it was the so-called liberal bloc's Justice Stevens who wrote the majority opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board rejecting a constitutional challenge to Indiana's voter ID law. (1) That suit challenged a state law requiring citizens who seek to vote at their designated polling place to present a driver's license or other government-issued photo identification. Although the law's supporters say the rules are needed to deter voter fraud, skeptics note that there have never been recorded instances of in-person voter impersonation in Indiana. They contend that the law is purely a partisan electoral gimmick--"a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic," as a Seventh Circuit judge wrote in dissenting from the court of appeals' decision upholding the law. (2) While most adults either already possess a valid photo ID or can easily obtain one, the plaintiffs in the case pointed out that some groups--specifically "the poor, the old, and the immobile"--will face economic and logistical hurdles in obtaining this documentation, which is likely to discourage them from voting. Thus, they reasoned, the law unconstitutionally and disproportionately burdens the right to vote, and should be struck down. But Justice Stevens, agreeing with the arguments of the Indiana Republican party, accepted that the state's four justifications for the 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--outweighed the burden of requiring these voters to obtain a valid photo ID. Even though Crawford easily could have come down along ideological lines, it generated an unusual 6-member majority. Only three justices dissented: Sourer, Ginsburg and Breyer. Justice Souter (joined by Justice Ginsburg) reasoned in his dissent that "Indiana's law does no more than assure that any in-person voter fraud will take place with fake IDs." He critcized the state's requirements that even people without cars must travel to a motor vehicle registry to get their IDs before they vote or else get to their county seats within 10 days after the election. In Justice Souter's opinion, the Indiana requirements translate into unjustified economic burdens uncomfortably close to the outright $1.50 fee we struck down 42 years ago [in Harper v. Virginia Bd. Of Elections]. 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. (3) Harper is the Court's famous 1966 decision striking down Virginia's poll tax, which conditioned the right to vote on the payment of $1.50. The state had argued that it had an interest in promoting civic responsibility by weeding out those voters who did not care enough about public affairs to pay a small sum for the privilege of voting, but the majority ruled that a state "violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. …