Georgia Voter I.D. Law Not Unconstitutional
Posted by Slobokan @ 23:28 · 322 words · print
The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday threw out a challenge to the state's voter ID law, ruling that the plaintiff who brought the case did not have legal standing to do it.
The court's decision reverses a ruling last September by a Fulton County judge who found the law unconstitutional.
…
The state Supreme Court's decision, written by Justice Harold Melton, found that plaintiff Rosalind L. Lake would not have been harmed by the 2006 law and, as a result, lacked standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.
In July 2006, Lake, who had moved from Florida to Georgia, qualified as a first-time voter at the polls, Melton wrote. For this reason, she could have voted in person without the need to show a photo ID, and she has made no contention that she did not have any of the forms of non-photo IDs allowed to be shown by first-time voters, the ruling said.
"As a result, Lake was qualified to vote in person under the 2006 Act at the time that she filed her complaint, and as a first-time voter who was qualified to vote at the time she filed her complaint, Lake lacked standing to challenge the constitutionality of the 2006 Act," the ruling said.
This is awesome news, although I am sure someone from the left will file some other lawsuit to try and keep it tied up in the courts.
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Posted In: Local Yokel
Posted by Simon
June 12, 2007 @ 09:05
Your headline's inaccurate; the court didn't rule that "Georgia['s] Voter I.D. Law [is] Not Unconstitutional," it ruled that the plaintiff in this case had no standing to ask the court to rule on whether the voter ID law is unconstitutional or not. Thus, the question of whether the "Georgia Voter I.D. Law [is or is] Not Unconstitutional" remains unanswered for another day.
Posted by Slobokan
June 12, 2007 @ 09:42
I disagree. It is accurate, until another plaintiff files a lawsuit and a court, any court, finds the law to be unconstitutional. Why?
Because, the decision by the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the ruling from last September by a Fulton County judge who found the law unconstitutional.
The reverse of unconstitutional is constitutional, and there is will stay until it is proven to be otherwise.
Posted by Simon
June 12, 2007 @ 15:44
Alas, it isn't even true as a formal matter to say that the judgment of the lower court was reversed – it was vacated. But even if the term used was "reversed" rather than "vacated," that does not mean that what the lower court declared white the Supreme Court declared black, so to speak. What the GASC said was that the litigant lacked standing from the outset, and thus no ajudication on the merits could possibly be valid. Put another way, GASC didn't say that the lower court reached the wrong decision, it said that the lower court had no power to reach any decision either way.
I suppose that in a sort of legal realist sense, one might say that any statute that has not been adjudicated as being unconstitutional is ipso facto unconstitutional, but I tend to think that were the United States Congress to pass a law doing something which it is explicitly prohibited from doing — perhaps if it laid a tax or duty on articles exported from Georgia to another state in the Union, contra Art. I § 9, for example — that law would be unconstitutional long before a case reached the Supreme Court for it to exercise its duty to say what the law is. It would be unconstitutional before it was even proposed.
Posted by Slobokan
June 12, 2007 @ 15:57
Legal realist sense?
The Georgia Voter I.D. Law is in fact, still a law.
The lower court ruling, that it was unconstitutional, however, has been "vacated".
All the legalese in the world doesn't change the fact that the law will in fact stay a law, unless it is found to be unconstitutional in the courts or repealed by another law.
Posted by Vinny
June 12, 2007 @ 16:39
Boys boys boys, it's simple… Constitutional until proven otherwise.
Done. :grin: