INDIANAPOLIS (CN) - A federal judge on Tuesday blocked an Indiana law passed in 2025 that removed photo IDs issued by public universities as an acceptable form of identification for use when voting.
Two voting rights groups, Count Us IN and Women4Change Indiana, along with Indiana University Bloomington student Josh Montagne claimed last May that Senate Bill 10 unfairly restricts their voting rights and called the law - signed into law in 2025 by Republican Governor Mike Braun - a "surgical attack on young voters."
In his 34-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Young found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their challenge and issued an injunction blocking the law.
"On this record, SB 10 looks more like a solution in search of a problem," Young, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote.
Specifically, Young found that the law burdened the plaintiffs' right to vote and noted student IDs containing the voter's name, photo and a valid expiration date had been used to vote at polling locations for almost 20 years.
"The law does not discriminate against students or young voters on its face. But by eliminating student IDs as an acceptable form of identification, defendants selectively excluded a form of identification that otherwise complies with the neutral criteria established by Indiana's voter ID law," he wrote.
Indiana had argued SB 10 was necessary to combat voter fraud - state IDs and driver's licenses, it said, were issued based on more rigorous standards. But Young found "although protecting public confidence is undoubtedly a strong interest in the abstract, defendants offer little evidence demonstrating why the burdens SB 10 imposes are necessary to further that interest."
Young noted that for many young students, obtaining a state ID or driver's licenses would require documentation they might not yet have, citing out-of-state students without access to birth certificates, or students living in dorms without the kind of rental contracts or utility bills usually used as proof of residency.
He said that the law would likely be overly burdensome, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, on students compared to other Indiana residents.
Young took issue with the law singling out student IDs and harkened to the state legislature's history of allowing certain types of identification to be exempt from some of the state's voter ID restrictions.
He specifically noted identification issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, military and tribal identification cards had been previously exempted from certain rules by the state legislature.
"In contrast, SB 10 marked the first time that Indiana singled out a previously acceptable form of ID and barred its use at the polls," wrote Young. "Students are the only group that are told that their widely held, government-issued ID cannot be used to vote."
The state had also argued that an injunction on the law would be especially problematic, given the upcoming May 5 primary elections. Though the injunction now comes just three weeks before the primaries, Young said he didn't see why it would be so difficult, as the state claimed, to update election material.
"Defendants provide no evidence that student IDs have ever caused confusion or otherwise complicated election administration," Young wrote. "In fact, before SB 10, student IDs merited only brief mention in poll-worker trainings."
Young estimates in his ruling SB 10 would have affected almost 40,000 students in Indiana and pointed to evidence from the election supervisor for Monroe County, estimating about two-thirds of voters at the Indiana University Bloomington campus used student IDs to vote in the 2024 general election.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita's office defended the law in court but did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. The voting rights groups did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Source: Courthouse News Service
