Crawford v. Marion County Election Board

dissenting.

Indiana’s “Voter ID Law”1 threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State’s citizens, see ante, at 198-199 (lead opinion), and a significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting, see ante, at 199. The statute is unconstitutional under the balancing standard of Burdick v. Ta~ kushi, 504 U. S. 428 (1992): a State may not burden the right to vote merely by invoking abstract interests, be they legitimate, see ante, at 191-197, or even compelling, but must make a particular, factual showing that threats to its interests outweigh the particular impediments it has imposed. The State has made no such justification here, and as to some aspects of its law, it has hardly even tried. I therefore respectfully dissent from the Court’s judgment sustaining the statute.2

*210I

Voting-rights cases raise two competing interests, the one side being the fundamental right to vote. See Burdick, supra, at 433 (“It is beyond cavil that ‘voting is of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure’ ” (quoting Illinois Bd. of Elections v. Socialist Workers Party, 440 U. S. 173, 184 (1979))); see also Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U. S. 1, 3-4 (2006) (per curiam); Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U. S. 330, 336 (1972); Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U. S. 533, 561-562 (1964); Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356,370 (1886). The Judiciary is obliged to train a skeptical eye on any qualification of that right. See Reynolds, supra, at 562 (“Especially since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized”).

As against the unfettered right, however, lies the “Common sense, as well as constitutional law ... that government must play an active role in structuring elections; ‘as a practical matter, there must be a substantial regulation of elections if they are to be fair and honest and if some sort of order, rather than chaos, is to accompany the democratic processes.’” Burdick, supra, at 433 (quoting Storer v. Brown, 415 U. S. 724, 730 (1974)); see also Burdick, 504 U. S., at 433 (“Election laws will invariably impose some burden upon individual voters”).

Given the legitimacy of interests on both sides, we have avoided preset levels of scrutiny in favor of a sliding-scale balancing analysis: the scrutiny varies with the effect of the regulation at issue. And whatever the claim, the Court has long made a careful, ground-level appraisal both of the practical burdens on the right to vote and of the State’s reasons for imposing those precise burdens. Thus, in Burdick:

“A court considering [such] a challenge . . . must weigh ‘the character and magnitude of the asserted injury to the rights protected by the First and Fourteenth *211Amendments that the jplaintiff seeks to vindicate’ against ‘the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule,’ taking into consideration ‘the extent to which those interests make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights.’” Id., at 434 (quoting Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, 789 (1983)).

The lead opinion does not disavow these basic principles. See ante, at 190-191 (discussing Burdick); see also ante, at 191 (“However slight [the] burden may appear, ... it must be justified by relevant and legitimate state interests sufficiently weighty to justify the limitation” (internal quotation marks omitted)). But I think it does not insist enough on the hard facts that our standard of review demands.

II

Under Burdick, “the rigorousness of our inquiry into the propriety of a state election law depends upon the extent to which a challenged regulation burdens First and Fourteenth Amendment rights,” 504 U. S., at 434, upon an assessment of the “ ‘character and magnitude of the asserted [threatened] injury,’ ” ibid, (quoting Anderson, supra, at 789), and an estimate of the number of voters likely to be affected.

A

The first set of burdens shown in these cases is the travel costs and fees necessary to get one of the limited variety of federal or state photo identifications needed to cast a regular ballot under the Voter ID Law.3 The travel is required for *212the personal visit to a license branch of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), which is demanded of anyone applying for a driver’s license or nondriver photo identification. See 458 F. Supp. 2d 775, 791 (SD Ind. 2006). The need to travel to a BMV branch will affect voters according to their circumstances, with the average person probably viewing it as nothing more than an inconvenience. Poor, old, and disabled voters who do not drive a car, however, may find the trip prohibitive,4 witness the fact that the BMV *213has far fewer license branches in each county than there are voting precincts.5 Marion County, for example, has over 900 active voting precincts, see Brief for Respondent Marion County Election Board 4,6 yet only 12 BMV license branches;7 in Lake County, there are 565 active voting precincts, see n. 6, supra, to match up with only 8 BMV locations;8 and Allen County, with 309 active voting precincts, see ibid., has only 3 BMV license branches.9 The same pattern holds in counties with smaller populations. Brown County has 12 active voter precincts, see ibid., and only 1 BMV office;10 while there were 18 polling places available in Fayette County’s 2007 municipal primary,11 there was only 1 BMV license branch;12 and Henry County, with 42 polling places approved for 2008 elections,13 has only 1 BMV office.

The burden of traveling to a more distant BMV office rather than a conveniently located polling place is probably *214serious for many of the individuals who lack photo identification.14 They almost certainly will not own cars, see Brief for Current and Former State Secretaries of State as Amici Curiae 11, and public transportation in Indiana is fairly limited. According to a report published by Indiana’s Department of Transportation in August 2007, 21 of Indiana’s 92 counties have no public transportation system at all,15 and as of 2000, nearly 1 in every 10 voters lived within 1 of these 21 counties.16 Among the counties with some public system, 21 provide service only within certain cities, and 32 others restrict public transportation to regional county service, *215leaving only 18 that offer eountywide public transportation, see n. 15, swpra. State officials recognize the effect that travel costs can have on voter turnout, as in Marion County, for example, where efforts have been made to “establish] most polling places in locations even more convenient than the statutory minimum,” in order to “provid[e] for neighborhood voting.” Brief for Respondent Marion County Election Board 3-4.

Although making voters travel farther than what is convenient for most and possible for some does not amount to a “severe” burden under Burdick, that is no reason to ignore the burden altogether. It translates into an obvious economic cost (whether in worktime lost, or getting and paying for transportation) that an Indiana voter must bear to obtain an ID.

For those voters who can afford the round trip, a second financial hurdle appears: in order to get photo identification for the first time, they need to present “a birth certificate, certificate of naturalization, U. S. veterans photo identification, U. S. military photo identification, or a U. S. passport.” Ante, at 198, n. 17 (lead opinion) (citing Ind. Admin. Code, tit. 140, §7-4-3 (2008)). As the lead opinion says, the two most common of these documents come at a price: Indiana counties charge anywhere from $3 to $12 for a birth certificate (and in some other States the fee is significantly higher), see ante, at 198, n. 17, and that same price must usually be paid for a first-time passport, since a birth certificate is required to prove U. S. citizenship by birth. The total fees for a passport, moreover, are up to about $100.17 So most voters must pay at least one fee to get the ID necessary to cast *216a regular ballot.18 As with the travel costs, these fees are far from shocking on their face, but in the Burdick analysis it matters that both the travel costs and the fees are disproportionately heavy for, and thus disproportionately likely to deter, the poor, the old, and the immobile.

B

To be sure, Indiana has a provisional-ballot exception to the ID requirement for individuals the State considers “indigent”19 as well as those with religious objections to being photographed, see ante, at 199-200 (lead opinion), and this sort of exception could in theory provide a way around the costs of procuring an ID. But Indiana’s chosen exception does not amount to much relief.

The law allows these voters who lack the necessary ID to sign the pollbook and cast a provisional ballot. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 786 (citing Ind. Code Ann. §3-11-8-25.1 (West Supp. 2007)). As the lead opinion recognizes, though, ante, at 199-200, that is only the first step; to have the provisional ballot counted, a voter must then appear in person before the circuit court clerk or county election board within 10 days of the election, to sign an affidavit attesting to indigency or religious objection to being photographed (or to present an *217ID at that point),20 see 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 786. Unlike the trip to the BMV (which, assuming things go smoothly, needs to be made only once every four years for renewal of non-driver photo identification, see id., at 791), this one must be taken every time a poor person or religious objector wishes to vote, because the State does not allow an affidavit to count in successive elections. And unlike the trip to the BMV (which at least has a handful of license branches in the more populous counties), a county has only one county seat. Forcing these people to travel to the county seat every time they try to vote is particularly onerous for the reason noted already, that most counties in Indiana either lack public transportation or offer only limited coverage. See supra, at 213-215.

That the need to travel to the county seat each election amounts to a high hurdle is shown in the results of the 2007 municipal elections in Marion County, to which Indiana’s Voter ID Law applied. Thirty-four provisional ballots were cast, but only two provisional voters made it to the county clerk’s office within the 10 days. See Brief for Respondent Marion County Election Board 8-9. All 34 of these aspiring voters appeared at the appropriate precinct; 33 of them provided a signature, and every signature matched the one on file; and 26 of the 32 voters whose ballots were not counted had a history of voting in Marion County elections. See id., at 9.

All of this suggests that provisional ballots do not obviate the burdens of getting photo identification. And even if that were not so, the provisional-ballot option would be inade*218quate for a further reason: the indigency exception by definition offers no relief to those voters who do not consider themselves (or would not be considered) indigent but as a practical matter would find it hard, for nonfinancial reasons, to get the required ID (most obviously the disabled).

C

Indiana’s Voter ID Law thus threatens to impose serious burdens on the voting right, even if not “severe” ones, and the next question under Burdick is whether the number of individuals likely to be affected is significant as well. Record evidence and facts open to judicial notice answer yes.

Although the District Court found that petitioners failed to offer any reliable empirical study of numbers of voters affected, see ante, at 200 (lead opinion),21 we may accept that court’s rough calculation that 43,000 voting-age residents lack the kind of identification card required by Indiana’s law. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 807. The District Court made that estimate by comparing BMV records reproduced in petitioners’ statistician’s report with U. S. Census Bureau figures for Indiana’s voting-age population in 2004, see ibid., and the State does not argue that these raw data are unreliable.

The State, in fact, shows no discomfort with the District Court’s finding that an “estimated 43,000 individuals” (about 1% of the State’s voting-age population) lack a qualifying ID. Brief for State Respondents 25. If the State’s willingness to take that number is surprising, it may be less so in light of the District Court’s observation that “several factors . . . suggest the percentage of Indiana’s voting age population with photo identification is actually lower than 99%, ” 458 *219F. Supp. 2d, at 807, n. 43,22 a suggestion in line with national surveys showing roughly 6%-10% of voting-age Americans without a state-issued photo identification card. See Brief for Petitioners in No. 07-21, pp. 39-40, n. 17 (citing National Commission on Election Reform, To Assure Pride and Confidence: Task Force Reports, ch. VI: Verification of Identity, p. 4 (Aug. 2001), http://webstorage3.mcpa.virginia.edu/ commissions/comm_2001_taskforce.pdf). We have been offered no reason to think that Indiana does a substantially better job of distributing IDs than other States.23

*220So a fair reading of the data supports the District Court’s finding that around 43,000 Indiana residents lack the needed identification, and will bear the burdens the law imposes. To be sure, the 43,000 figure has to be discounted to some extent, residents of certain nursing homes being exempted from the photo identification requirement. 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 786. But the State does not suggest that this narrow exception could possibly reduce 43,000 to an insubstantial number.24

The upshot is this. Tens of thousands of voting-age residents lack the necessary photo identification. A large proportion of them are likely to be in bad shape economically, *221see 472 F. 3d 949, 951 (CA7 2007) (“No doubt most people who don’t have photo ID are low on the economic ladder”); cf. Bullock v. Carter, 405 U. S. 134, 144 (1972) (“[W]e would ignore reality were we not to recognize that this system falls with unequal weight on voters . . . according to their economic status”).25 The Voter ID Law places hurdles in the way of either getting an ID or of voting provisionally, and they translate into nontrivial economic costs. There is accordingly no reason to doubt that a significant number of state residents will be discouraged or disabled from voting. Cf. 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 823 (“We do not doubt that such individuals exist somewhere, even though Plaintiffs were unable to locate them”); 472 F. 3d, at 952 (“No doubt there are at least a few [whom the law will deter from voting] in Indiana . . . ”); see also ante, at 199-200 (lead opinion).

Petitioners, to be sure, failed to nail down precisely how great the cohort of discouraged and totally deterred voters will be, but empirical precision beyond the foregoing numbers has never been demanded for raising a voting-rights claim. Cf. Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, 552 U. S. 442, 461-462 (2008) (Roberts, C. J., concurring) (“Nothing in my analysis requires the parties to produce studies regarding voter perceptions on this score”); Dunn, 405 U. S., at 335, n. 5 (“[I]t would be difficult to determine precisely how many would-be voters throughout the country cannot vote because of durational residence *222requirements”); Bullock, supra, at 144 (taking account of “the obvious likelihood” that candidate filing fees would “fall more heavily on the less affluent segment of the community, whose favorites may be unable to pay the large costs”). While of course it would greatly aid a plaintiff to establish his claims beyond mathematical doubt, he does enough to show that serious burdens are likely.

Thus, petitioners’ case is clearly strong enough to prompt more than a cursory examination of the State’s asserted interests. And the fact that Indiana’s photo identification requirement is one of the most restrictive in the country, see Brief for Current and Former State Secretaries of State as Amici Curiae 27-30 (compiling state voter-identification statutes); see also Brief for State of Texas et al. as Amici Curiae 10-13 (same),26 makes a critical examination of the *223State’s claims all the more in order. Cf. Randall v. Sorrell, 548 U. S. 230, 253 (2006) (plurality opinion) (citing as a “danger sig[n]” that “contribution limits are substantially lower than . . . comparable limits in other States,” and concluding that “[w]e consequently must examine the record independently and carefully to determine whether [the] limits are ‘closely drawn’ to match the State’s interests”); id., at 284, 288 (Souter, J., dissenting) (finding that deference was appropriate on the reasoning that limits were “consistent with limits set by the legislatures of many other States, all of them with populations larger than Vermont’s,” and that “[t]he Legislature of Vermont evidently tried to account for the realities of campaigning in Vermont”).

Ill

Because the lead opinion finds only “limited” burdens on the right to vote, see ante, at 202-203, it avoids a hard look at the State’s claimed interests. See ante, at 191-197. But having found the Voter ID Law burdens far from trivial, I have to make a rigorous assessment of “ ‘the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule,’ [and] ‘the extent to which those inter*224ests make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights.’” Burdick, 504 U. S., at 434 (quoting Anderson, 460 U. S., at 789).

As this quotation from Burdick indicates, the interests claimed to justify the regulatory scheme are subject to discount in two distinct ways. First, the generalities raised by the State have to be shaved down to the precise “aspect[s of claimed interests] addressed by the law at issue.” California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U. S. 567, 584 (2000) (emphasis deleted); see ibid, (scrutiny of state interests “is not to be made in the abstract, by asking whether [the interests] are highly significant values; but rather by asking whether the aspect of [those interests] addressed by the law at issue is highly significant” (emphasis in original)). And even if the State can show particularized interests addressed by the law, those interests are subject to further discount.depending on “the extent to which [they] make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights.” Burdick, supra, at 434 (internal quotation marks omitted).

As the lead opinion sees it, the State has offered four related concerns that suffice to justify the Voter ID 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. See ante, at 191-197. On closer look, however, it appears that the first two (which are really just one) can claim modest weight at best, and the latter two if anything weaken the State’s case.

A

The lead opinion’s discussion of the State’s reasons begins with the State’s asserted interests in “election modernization,” ante, at 192-197, and in combating voter fraud, see ante, at 194-197. Although these are given separate headings, any line drawn between them is unconvincing; as I un*225derstand it, the “effort to modernize elections,” Brief for State Respondents 12, is not for modernity’s sake, but to reach certain practical (or political) objectives.27 In any event, if a proposed modernization were in fact aimless, if it were put forward as change for change’s sake, a State could not justify any appreciable burden on the right to vote that might ensue; useless technology has no constitutional value. And in fact that is not the case here. The State says that it adopted the ID law principally to combat voter fraud, and it is this claim, not the slogan of “election modernization,” that warrants attention.

1

There is no denying the abstract importance, the compelling nature, of combating voter fraud. See Purcell, 549 U. S., at 4 (acknowledging “the State’s compelling interest in preventing voter fraud”); cf. Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Comm., 489 U. S. 214, 231 (1989) (“A State indisputably has a compelling interest in preserving the integrity of its election process”). But it takes several steps to get beyond the level of abstraction here.

To begin with, requiring a voter to show photo identification before casting a regular ballot addresses only one form of voter fraud: in-person voter impersonation. The photo identification requirement leaves untouched the problems of absentee-ballot fraud, which (unlike in-person voter impersonation) is a documented problem in Indiana, see 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 793; of registered voters voting more than once (but maintaining their own identities) in different counties or in different States; of felons and other disqualified individuals voting in their own names; of vote buying; or, for that matter, of ballot stuffing, ballot miscounting, voter *226intimidation, or any other type of corruption on the part of officials administering elections. See Brief for Brennan Center for Justice et al. as Amici Curiae 7.

And even the State’s interest in deterring a voter from showing up at the polls and claiming to be someone he is not must, in turn, be discounted for the fact that the State has not come across a single instance of in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Indiana’s history. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 792-793; see also ante, at 194-197 (lead opinion). Neither the District Court nor the Indiana General Assembly that passed the Voter ID Law was given any evidence whatsoever of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the State. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 793. This absence of support is consistent with the experience of several veteran poll watchers in Indiana, each of whom submitted testimony in the District Court that he had never witnessed an instance of attempted voter impersonation fraud at the polls. Ibid. It is also consistent with the dearth of evidence of in-person voter impersonation in any other part of the country. See ante, at 195, n. 12 (lead opinion) (conceding that there are at most “scattered instances of in-person voter fraud”); see also Brief for Brennan Center for Justice, supra, at 11-25 (demonstrating that “the national evidence — including the very evidence relied on by the courts below — suggests that the type of voting fraud that may be remedied by a photo identification requirement is virtually nonexistent: the ‘problem’ of voter impersonation is not a real problem at all”).28

The State responds to the want of evidence with the assertion that in-person voter impersonation fraud is hard to de*227tect. But this is like saying the “man who wasn’t there” is hard to spot,29 and to know whether difficulty in detection accounts for the lack of evidence one at least has to ask whether in-person voter impersonation is (or would be) relatively harder to ferret out than other kinds of fraud (e. g., by absentee ballot) which the State has had no trouble documenting. The answer seems to be no; there is reason to think that “impersonation of voters is . . . the most likely type of fraud to be discovered.” U. S. Election Assistance Commission, Election Crimes: An Initial Review and Recommendations for Future Study 9 (Dec. 2006) (hereinafter EAC Report), http://www.eac.gov/clearinghouse/docs/ reports-and-surveys-2006electioncrimes.pdf/attachment_ download/file. This is in part because an individual who impersonates another at the polls commits his fraud in the open, under the scrutiny of local pollworkers who may well recognize a fraudulent voter when they hear who he claims to be. See Brief for Respondent Marion County Election Board 6 (“[P]reeinet workers may recognize an imposter, and precinct election workers have the authority to challenge persons appearing to vote if the election board member ‘is not satisfied that a person who offers to vote is the person who the person represents the person to be’ ” (quoting Ind. Code Ann. §3-11-8-27 (West 2006))).

The relative ease of discovering in-person voter impersonation is also owing to the odds that any such fraud will be committed by “organized groups such as campaigns or political parties” rather than by individuals acting alone. L. Minnite & D. Callahan, Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Election Fraud 14 (2003), http://www.demos.org/pubs/ EDR_-_Securing_the_Vote.pdf. It simply is not worth it for individuals acting alone to commit in-person voter impersonation, which is relatively ineffectual for the foolish few *228who may commit it. If an imposter gets caught, he is subject to severe criminal penalties. See, e. g., Ind. Code Ann. §3-14-2-9 (West 2006) (making it a felony “knowingly [to] vot[e] or offe[r] to vote at an election when the person is not registered or authorized to vote”); § 3-14-2-11 (with certain exceptions, “a person who knowingly votes or offers to vote in a precinct except the one in which the person is registered and resides” commits a felony); § 3-14-2-12(1) (making it a felony “knowingly [to] vot[e] or mak[e] application to vote in an election in a name other than the person’s own”); § 3-14-2-12(2) (a person who, “having voted once at an election, knowingly applies to vote at the same election in the person’s own name or any other name” commits a felony); see also 42 U. S. C. § 1973i(e)(l) (any individual who “votes more than once” in certain federal elections “shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both”). And even if he succeeds, the imposter gains nothing more than one additional vote for his candidate. See EAC Report 9 (in-person voter impersonation “is an inefficient method of influencing an election”); J. Levitt, The Truth About Voter Fraud 7 (2007), online at http://truthaboutfraud. org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf (“[F]raud by individual voters is a singularly foolish and ineffective way to attempt to win an election. Each act of voter fraud in connection with a federal election risks five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, in addition to any state penalties. In return, it yields at most one incremental vote. That single extra vote is simply not worth the price” (footnote omitted)); cf. 472 F. 3d, at 951 (“[A] vote in a political election rarely has any instrumental value, since elections for political office at the state or federal level are never decided by just one vote” (emphasis in original)).

In sum, fraud by individuals acting alone, however difficult to detect, is unlikely. And while there may be greater incentives for organized groups to engage in broad-gauged in-*229person voter impersonation fraud, see Minnite & Callahan, supra, at 20, it is also far more difficult to conceal larger enterprises of this sort. The State’s argument about the difficulty of detecting the fraud lacks real force.

2

Nothing else the State has to say does much to bolster its case. The State argues, for example, that even without evidence of in-person voter impersonation in Indiana, it is enough for the State to show that “opportunities [for such fraud] are transparently obvious in elections without identification checks,” Brief for State Respondents 54. Of course they are, but Indiana elections before the Voter ID Law were not run “without identification checks”; on the contrary, as the Marion County Election Board informs us, “[t]imetested systems were in place to detect in-person voter impersonation fraud before the challenged statute was enacted,” Brief for Respondent Marion County Election Board 6. These included hiring pollworkers who were precinct residents familiar with the neighborhood and making signature comparisons, each effort being supported by the criminal provisions mentioned before. Id., at 6-8.

For that matter, the deterrence argument can do only so much work, since photo identification is itself hardly a fail-safe against impersonation. Indiana knows this, and that is why in 2007 the State began to issue redesigned driver’s licenses with digital watermarking.30 The State has made this shift precisely because, in the words of its BMV, “visual inspection is not adequate to determine the authenticity” of driver’s licenses. See Indiana BMV, supra n. 30. Indeed, the BMV explains that the digital watermark (which can be scanned using equipment that, so far, Indiana does not use *230at polling places) is needed to “tak[e] the guesswork out of inspection.” Ibid.31 So, at least until polling places have the machines and special software to scan the new driver’s licenses, and until all the licenses with the older designs expire (the licenses issued after 2006 but before the 2007 redesigning are good until 2012, see 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 791), Indiana’s law does no more than ensure that any in-person voter fraud will take place with fake IDs, not attempted signature forgery.

Despite all this, I will readily stipulate that a State has an interest in responding to the risk (however small) of in-person voter impersonation. See ante, at 196 (lead opinion). I reach this conclusion, like others accepted by the Court, because “ ‘[wjhere a legislature has significantly greater institutional expertise, as, for example, in the field of election regulation, the Court in practice defers to empirical legislative judgments.’ ” Randall, 548 U. S., at 285 (Souter, J., dissenting) (quoting Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U. S. 377, 402 (2000) (Breyer, J., concurring)). Weight is owed to the legislative judgment as such. But the ultimate valuation of the particular interest a State asserts has to take account of evidence against it as well as legislative judgments for it (certainly when the law is one of the most restrictive of its kind, see n. 26, supra), and on this record it would be unreasonable to accord this assumed state interest more than very modest significance.32

*2313

The antifraud rationale is open to skepticism on one further ground, what Burdick spoke of as an assessment of the degree of necessity for the State’s particular course of action. Two points deserve attention, the first being that the State has not even tried to justify its decision to implement the photo identification requirement immediately on passage of the new law. A phase-in period would have given the State time to distribute its newly designed licenses, and to make a genuine effort to get them to individuals in need, and a period for transition is exactly what the Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Carter and former Secretary of State Baker, recommended in its report. See Building Confidence in U. S. Elections §2.5 (Sept. 2005), App. 136, 140 (hereinafter Carter-Baker Report) (“For the next two federal elections, until January 1, 2010, in states that require voters to present identification at the polls, voters who fail to do so should nonetheless be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, and their ballot would count if their signature is verified”). During this phase-in period, the report said, States would need to make “efforts to ensure that all voters are provided convenient opportunities to obtain” the required identification. Id., at 141. The former President and former Secretary of State explained this recommendation in an op-ed essay:

“Yes, we are concerned about the approximately 12 percent of citizens who lack a driver’s license. So we proposed that states finally assume the responsibility to seek out citizens to both register voters and pro*232vide them with free ID’s that meet federal standards. States should open new offices, use social service agencies and deploy mobile offices to register voters. By connecting ID’s to registration, voting participation will be expanded.” Carter & Baker, Voting Reform Is in the Cards, N. Y. Times, Sept. 23, 2005, p. A19.

Although Indiana claims to have adopted its ID requirement relying partly on the Carter-Baker Report, see Brief for State Respondents 5,13, 49; see also ante, at 194 (lead opinion), the State conspicuously rejected the Carter-Baker Report’s phase-in recommendation aimed at reducing the burdens on the right to vote, and just as conspicuously fails even to try to explain why.

What is left of the State’s claim must be downgraded further for one final reason: regardless of the interest the State may have in adopting a photo identification requirement as a general matter, that interest in no way necessitates the particular burdens the Voter ID Law imposes on poor people and religious objectors. Individuals unable to get photo identification are forced to travel to the county seat every time they wish to exercise the franchise, and they have to get there within 10 days of the election. See supra, at 216-218. Nothing about the State’s interest in fighting voter fraud justifies this requirement of a postelection trip to the county seat instead of some verification process at the polling places.

In briefing this Court, the State responds by pointing to an interest in keeping lines at polling places short. See Brief for State Respondents 58. It warns that “[i]f election workers — a scarce resource in any election — must attend to the details of validating provisional ballots, voters may have to wait longer to vote,” and it assures us that “[njothing deters voting so much as long lines at the polls.” Ibid. But this argument fails on its own terms, for whatever might be the number of individuals casting a provisional ballot, the *233State could simply allow voters to sign the indigency affidavit at the polls subject to review there after the election.33 After all, the Voter ID Law already requires voters lacking photo identification to sign, at the polling site, an affidavit attesting to proper registration. See 458 F. Supp. 2d, at 786.

Indeed, the State’s argument more than fails; it backfires, in implicitly conceding that a not-insignificant number of individuals will need to rely on the burdensome provisional-ballot mechanism. What is more, as the District Court found, the Voter ID Law itself actually increases the likelihood of delay at the polls. Since any minor discrepancy between a voter’s photo identification card and the registration information may lead to a challenge, “the opportunities for presenting challenges ha[ve] increased as a result of the photo identification requirements.” Id., at 789; cf. 472 F. 3d, at 955 (Evans, J., dissenting) (“The potential for mischief with this law is obvious. Does the name on the ID ‘conform’ to the name on the voter registration list? If the last name of a newly married woman is on the ID but her maiden name is on the registration list, does it conform? If a name is misspelled on one — Schmit versus Schmitt — does it conform? If a ‘Terence’ appears on one and a shortened ‘Terry’ on the other, does it conform?”).

B

The State’s asserted interests in modernizing elections and combating fraud are decidedly modest; at best, they fail to offset the clear inference that thousands of Indiana citizens will be discouraged from voting. The two remaining justifications, meanwhile, a