A federal judge struck down an Indiana law barring students from using their school-issued IDs to vote, dealing a blow to the law as early voting in the state is already underway.
U.S. District Judge Richard Young, a nominee of former President Bill Clinton, ruled that SB 10, an Indiana law passed in 2025 that made student IDs insufficient for use as voter identification, unconstitutionally burdens students’ right to vote under the First and 14th amendments. The ruling comes weeks before the state’s May 5 primary election, and roughly a week after early voting for that primary began.
Young sided with the students suing to block the law, finding that it disproportionately affects the ability of young people and students to vote in elections in the Hoosier State.
“On its face, SB 10 is nondiscriminatory; under Indiana law, the term ‘proof of identification’ for voting purposes no longer ‘include[s] a document issued by an educational institution,’” Young said in his ruling. “This regulation applies to voters of any age who hold a public-university-issued ID; it does not apply exclusively to young voters and students.
“University faculty and staff, for example, are among those who possess a university-issued ID. But its general applicability notwithstanding, the effects of SB 10 clearly ‘fall more heavily’ on young voters and students given they possess a sizable majority of public-university-issued IDs.”
The state argued that students’ IDs from state universities vary too much in appearance and content to be considered reliable forms of voter ID, alongside concerns that several schools do not include an expiration date on their student IDs. Indiana officials centered most of their arguments on simplifying the voter ID process to increase confidence in elections.
Young rejected arguments from the state that its interest in orderly election administration was a valid reason to pass the law, claiming the state provided “no evidence that student IDs have ever caused confusion or otherwise complicated election administration.”
“Defendants claim that SB 10 promotes this interest by streamlining Indiana’s photo ID requirement to make the acceptable forms of identification more uniform, objective, and verifiable,” Young wrote in his ruling. “And yet, if anything, SB 10 does the opposite, for it creates an exception for a single form of voter ID that otherwise meets the law’s neutral requirements.”
The judge also dismissed concerns from the state that striking down the law would violate the Purcell principle, a standard set by the Supreme Court that courts should generally avoid changing “election rules on the eve of an election.”
“The requested relief only requires Defendants to accept student IDs as a form of voter identification—something Indiana has already done for nearly two decades,” Young said in his ruling, which changes state election law less than three weeks before the election.
The state quickly filed a notice that it intends to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
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