For Hoosiers concerned about exercising their constitutional rights safely in the midst of a pandemic, there hasn’t been a lot of good news about voting.
They have a governor who refuses to make mail-in voting available to all, who talks about in-person voting with nostalgia while the coronavirus shows no sign of letting up.
Meanwhile, the president charges — without evidence — that mail-in voting leads to massive fraud.
Add to that the uproar over the cost-cutting measures implemented by the U.S. Postal Service that have been faulted for slowing mail delivery and criticized as an effort to disenfranchise mail-in voters.
All of these challenges remain, but last week brought a victory. On Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana blocked the state of Indiana from purging voters from registration lists without certain federal safeguards in place to prevent eligible voters from being improperly removed.
The court issued a permanent injunction, prohibiting the state from implementing a law that would have allowed the state to remove any Indiana registrant from the list of eligible voters who has changed address without contacting that person directly and without providing the notice and observing the waiting period required by the National Voter Registration Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Indiana, Demos and the firm Davis Wright Tremaine challenged the law. The case was brought on behalf of Common Cause Indiana.
Previously in this case, federal courts had struck down a virtually identical law that relied on data from the controversial Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program. Instead of fixing the problems, Indiana enacted a new law that duplicated the same flawed procedures.
One of the authors of the original law, state Sen. Greg Walker, told the Indianapolis Star in 2017 that he felt certain the legislation was “a reasonable and effective way to keep accurate voter roll information.”
As we noted in a September 2017 comment, any law that complicates or creates obstacles to your right to vote is neither “reasonable” nor “effective.” And whatever the stated intentions of lawmakers who support such measures, it’s disenfranchisement.
“If allowed to stand, this law would have led to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters, especially voters of color,” said Barbara Bolling-Williams, president of the Indiana State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “Today’s ruling is a win for democracy and racial justice in the state of Indiana.”
Another win for Hoosier voters, expanded absentee voting for the November election, has been rejected by the governor. But voting rights advocates can celebrate this decision.
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