The details of Arkansas’ voter ID

By Dan Greenberg | The Arkansas Project

Some of the specifics of the Arkansas voter ID cases are a little difficult to follow, so I thought I’d lay out some of the basics for our readers.

1. A central question in voter ID litigation is: is the statute constitutional? A related question is: will the courts find the statute constitutional? (Some people would say that, since the courts get to say what is constitutional, these two questions are really the same.) Last week, Judge Tim Fox found that Arkansas’s voter ID law was unconstitutional.

2. None of the lawyers or parties in the case had asked Fox to decide the constitutionality of voter ID. The case before Judge Fox was about a relatively small issue – whether the state election board can enact a rule to cover an unanticipated situation involving absentee ballots.

at The Arkansas Project.