Should Americans be required to show photo identification in order to vote? Do laws requiring photo IDs prevent voter fraud or suppress minority votes? Opinions abound on all sides, but the answers to these questions could determine the fate of a key Bush administration nominee, a Supreme court case, and the perceived fairness of the 2008 presidential election.

Let's start with the basics. Tova Anderson of the Century Foundation has a nice, concise overview:

"The United States Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case regarding the constitutionality of Indiana’s strictest-in-the-nation voter identification law. Indiana currently requires every voter to present government-issued photo identification at the polls or be barred from voting. One of the main arguments made by the defenders of the law, in this case and in other identification litigation, is that there is a lack of data showing that voter identification requirements suppress voting or disproportionately impact particular groups.

"Memo to Supreme Court: that’s not true anymore.

"Over the past few years, several studies have demonstrated that minorities, the poor, young people, voters with disabilities, and older people are much less likely to have the necessary identification. For some courts and voter identification proponents, this has not been deemed sufficient.

"In just the past few weeks, however, some of the more respected political scientists in this field have issued reports using established social science methodologies demonstrating that identification laws do impact turnout negatively, and disproportionately impact already-marginalized groups...."

Voter ID laws are a particularly sensitive topic right now in Washington because the Bush administration's nominee to the understaffed Federal Election Commission, Hans Von Spakovsky, had a hand in the Department of Justice's approval of a 2005 Georgia Voter ID law that the Department's own legal staff likened to the poll taxes of the Jim Crow era. Von Spakovsky, who headed the DOJ's Voting rights division during Pres. Bush's first term, also approved a redistricting plan in Texas that violated the US Voting Rights Act, according to the Supreme Court. [Under the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice reviews changes in election procedures in states such as Georgia and Texas because both states have a history of willful violation of minority voting rights.]

Rahsaan is outraged:

"Hans von Spakovsky has built a career solidifying Republican control by disenfranchising untold thousands and subverting our most fundamental democratic right. "

Right now, Sens. Feingold and Obama have blocked a vote on the Von Spakovsky nomination, raising this objection:

“While at the Department of Justice, Hans von Spakovsky was directly involved in efforts to politicize the Department and use the Voting Rights Section to disenfranchise voters, rather than enforce our nation’s civil rights laws. As a recess appointee to the FEC he has been a committed, ideological opponent of the campaign finance laws he is supposed to enforce. Putting him at the head of the FEC is just another example of this administration putting the fox in charge of the hen house. We oppose his nomination, and any effort to tie his nomination to the other pending nominations to the FEC.”

Christy Hardin Smith says that von Spakovsky has a long history of involvement in minority voter suppression efforts:

"Try von Spakovsky sockpuppeting an article about voter suppression in violation of DOJ rules while he was still an employee there ostensibly working on civil rights issues. Or how about participating in an effort to disenfranchise elderly Native American voters in Arizona on a technicality rather than working to find a way to support their right to vote. Or the entire gaming the system for The Math scheme at the DOJ. Or that a number of his subordinates at the DOJ wrote in to the Senate to say that von Spakovsky has neither the ethical underpinnings nor the commitment to voting integrity that should not be gamed for political purposes to be anywhere near the FEC. And there is so much more: see Digby and Adam at ePluribusMedia, for starters. "

Meanwhile, in hearings today before the House Judiciary Committee, John Tanner, the current head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, offered a tortured defense of his own role in approving the Georgia Voter ID law. Tanner got himself in trouble earlier this month when he told a group of Latino political activists that while voter ID laws may disenfranchise older voters, people of color are not hurt because,

"[M]inorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."

Several Congressional Democrats have called for Tanner to be disciplined for the remarks. Tanner apologized because, he said,

"I understand that my explanation of the data came across in a hurtful way, which I deeply regret."