Judge Posner has changed his mind on this election issue
Judge Richard Posner of the federal appeals court based in Chicago says he got it wrong when he wrote a 2007 opinion upholding a voter ID law.
Posner wrote about his misgivings about the opinion in his new book, Reflections on Judging, and he elaborated in a video interview with the Huffington Post, the New York Times reports. When he wrote the opinion, Posner told the Huffington Post, the judges weren’t given strong indications that such laws would exclude people from voting who were entitled to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the opinion by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008.
Posner said the 7th Circuit dissenter, Judge Terence Evans (who has since died), was right. Evans began his dissent: “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
