The state court said the law violated the Indiana Constitution by not treating all voters equally.
 
The legislature passed the voter ID law in 2005, and it was challenged in federal court. The Supreme Court upheld it in April 2008, but that July the League of Women Voters brought a new suit in state court.
 
“The court here accepted a lot of the arguments that were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Prof. Richard L. Hasen of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles said of Thursday’s decision, “so it’s like a second bite of the apple.”
 
The major difference between the state court decision and the Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board is that the state court was interpreting the Indiana Constitution, while the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution of the United States. Generally, state courts are given the last word in interpreting their own constitutions.
 
Indiana’s Equal Privileges and Immunities Clause is similar to the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. But in the ruling Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals found that the voter ID law violated the state’s equal protection guarantee because it did not require mail-in voters and residents of some nursing homes to produce state-approved identification.