Attorney: Move to Indiana no-excuse absentee voting led by liberal lawyers

(The Center Square) – A top Indiana elections attorney says liberal lawyers are behind the move to get the Supreme Court to invalidate Indiana’s absentee voting laws.

But he doesn’t think it’ll work.

“I don’t think there’s any chance in the world that the Supreme Court would take this up, or that they would succeed in it,” attorney Jim Bopp, of Terre Haute, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

Last week, three law firms – two Indianapolis firms and a national firm, Mayer Brown LLP – filed a petition to the Supreme Court on behalf of a group called Indiana Vote by Mail and nine Indiana voters.

There are a total of nine lawyers on the petition: Bill Groth of the Vlink Law Firm of Indianapolis, Mark Sniderman, with Findling Park Conyers of Indianapolis, and seven attorneys with Mayer Brown, including Jed Glickstein of the Chicago office and Andrew Pincus of the Washington, DC, office.

In the petition, they claim one of the 11 reasons allowed to vote absentee in Indiana – being 65 years old or older – discriminates against voters age 18-64 and therefor is in violation of the Constitution, both the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘Equal Protection’ clause guaranteeing equal protection of the laws.

The lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to toss the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which held that Indiana’s absentee voting system “does not affect Plaintiffs’ right to vote and does not violate the Constitution.”

But the remedy Groth and the other attorneys are requesting is not eliminating the reason for 65 and up, which would mean that voters would have to claim another reason in order to vote absentee, such as being out of the county on election day, or needing to work the entire 12 hours that the polls are open.

Instead, they want the reason to vote absentee to apply to voters of all ages.

“Normally, when a state law is deemed to be in violation of the Constitution because it’s restrictive, the right that is at issue is extended to all persons, not completely eliminated,” says Groth when asked about this.

Groth is Democratic labor lawyer who represented the Indiana Democratic Party in fighting Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008. The case went the Supreme Court, where the law was held to be constitutional.

He was also the attorney representing plaintiffs in an attempt to kick Attorney General Curtis Hill out of office, claiming he was no longer eligible to serve as attorney general because his law license had been suspended. The suit was unsuccessful.

Last spring, Groth and fellow Indianapolis attorney Mark Sniderman, of Findling Park Conyers, filed the case in federal court in Indiana challenging the state’s absentee voting laws. He says they want the court to acknowledge not just that voting is a fundamental right, but that voting by mail is a fundamental right, also.

When asked specifically whether he believes that voting by mail is a constitutional right, he says:

“It’s our position that it is.”

All legal work is being done pro bono – at no cost to the plaintiffs.

When asked why lawyers would do this work pro bono, Groth says because “it’s an important issue” and the lawyers involved “are committed to doing public-interest law.”

“I’ve practiced law for 46 years,” he said by phone on Tuesday. “I basically am on a semi-retired status and I don’t take pay any longer, particularly if I’m representing a not-for-profit, public interest group.”

He says he thinks there’s a good chance the Supreme Court will accept the petition and consider the case.

“You start with the fact that I think the court only grants about 2% of petitions that are filed, but I think this petition has a much better chance than the run-of-the-mill petitions for the reasons that are set forth in the petition itself,” he said.

Bopp says what the lawyers are asking – to identify voting by mail as a constitutional right — is something no court has ever done.

“It would be a radical rewriting of the right to vote,” says Bopp.

“This is part of the liberal agenda, which is…their view is ‘every one’ should be able to vote. And you notice I said ‘one’ – I didn’t say ‘eligible voter.’ I didn’t say ‘citizen’… I mean, their position is, everybody should be allowed to vote. So they view any requirement that somebody has to meet to even cast a ballot in a certain way, like by absentee, that it should be struck down.”

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