I’m wondering: What, exactly, is the most we can do? Require wheelchair-bound citizens to walk to their polling places? Require everyone older than 65 to turn a cartwheel while entering? Refuse entry to everyone who does not display a flag lapel pin?
This is not a rhetorical question, because the Stevens opinion holds in effect that any burden can be placed upon a relatively small percentage of citizens. What matters is not the level of burden but instead the number of citizens burdened. So a state such as Michigan that is undergoing a significant economic downturn and therefore has a substantial number of Republicans who would be financially burdened by, say, a poll tax levied (ostensibly) to defray the costs of maintaining the voting equipment could not constitutionally enact such a poll tax, but Indiana, Michigan’s wealthy neighbor to the south, could. At least until the recession spreads to suburban Indianapolis and, say, metropolitan Evansville, although in the latter, corn and soy futures these days may enable some who otherwise could not afford a poll tax to pay the tax and vote.
After all, as Stevens said, we wouldn’t want a close election to be determined by vote fraud; been there, done that, in 1868. Or by citizens who do not have a state-issued photo I.D., as long as their numbers remain low enough to swing only close elections to the Democrats. (Of course, in Florida the number of elderly nursing-home residents who have no state-issued photo I.D. probably is significant enough to swing even an otherwise-not-so-close election, but most of those people are transplants from such Democratic strongholds as New York City and suburban Chicago, so we don’t want elections determined by them either. Not if we’re Republican, anyway.)
Or, presumably, by anyone else who has, or until now had, the right to vote but who might choose to buy the week’s groceries instead of voting, faced with the choice.
