Earlier this week, I called the Indiana voter ID decision American-style backslide. For those outside the jargon community, “backslide” happens when a regime becomes more authoritarian. It is an action (i.e. raiding an opposition party headquarters) or structural rules change (i.e. making it virtually impossible for opposition parties to get on a ballot) that effects a persistent chill in democratic contestation.

“Backslide” usually describes “developing” democracies, but I (with some academic backers) reject the notion that the “consolidated” democracies are fully “democratized” and therefore immune to description as “backsliding.”

My own colleagues pushed back. I was being extreme in my characterization of the decision, they said. Countries do not move along a simple democracy-authoritarianism continuum. They become less perfect democracies, but they do not become authoritarian. Ok. Maybe.

Even academic debate over voter ID takes its democratic compatibility for granted. Much of the discussion on the election-law listserv is dryly empirical. What are the effects of voter ID on turnout? To what extent does it really disenfranchise the groups activists claim it will? How can we operationalize those questions? Most - but thankfully not all - talk of voter ID is in terms of an utilitarian harm calculus. Regardless of the policy, democracy is safe in America.

I disagree. Democracy is relatively new in America, and “backslide” can describe our country as anyone else’s. The Polity IV index (PDF) considers America a stable democracy since 1809, even though slavery persisted for 56 more years. I would argue the transition to democracy happened over a century later, when federal voting rights legislation overturned systematic, mass disenfranchisement at the state level. One might argue the transition is still happening. Where is our enshrined right to vote? Why do elected officials control the elections that elect them?

In today’s NY Times, Adam Cohen draws on history to make the point much clearer than I had using comparative examples. Voter ID, he says, is a “modern poll tax.” Calling for federal regulation and standardization of election administration, he writes:

It is chilling to think that state legislators and election officials would intentionally try to make it harder for Americans to vote, but they always have — with poll taxes, literacy tests and gerrymandering. There was a time when the Supreme Court regularly struck these restrictions down. In 1966, it held Virginia’s $1.50 poll tax unconstitutional. In 1972, it ruled that Tennessee’s one-year residency requirement for voting violated the Constitution.

Now the Supreme Court has switched sides. This week, it upheld a harsh Indiana voter ID law that could disenfranchise many poor, elderly and student voters. The ruling will make it even easier for other states to block voters’ access to the ballot box

Read the article, especially the first few grafs, for appalling worst practices. Here’s a teaser: former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in 2004 trashed voter registration forms printed on the ‘wrong’ paper weight.

Voter ID is contrived, incremental disenfranchisement through legal channels. It is consistent with historical stains on America’s democratic process, and it is consistent with contemporary examples of backslide worldwide: opposition-fragmenting districting in Morocco, ballot access restrictions and election ‘reform’ in Russia, and power-consolidating election ‘reform’ Kyrgyzstan, to name a few. As we promote democracy elsewhere, we should remember how new and fragile it is at home. We should promote it here too.

As a start, we should see the federalism of election administration for what it is: an excuse for states to inscrutably limit voting rights.