Federal judge blocks Indiana’s ban on use of student IDs for voting

A federal judge issued an order Tuesday blocking an Indiana law that banned the use of college-issued student identification cards for voting.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Young granted the preliminary injunction sought by groups that filed a lawsuit challenging the student ID ban soon after it was approved by the Legislature last year.

Young ruled that the challengers would likely succeed in their arguments that the law “imposes unconstitutional burdens on students and young voters in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

Students had been allowed to use identification cards issued by public universities at polling places to meet Indiana’s voter ID law under requirements that they included the voter’s name, photo and a valid expiration date.

Republican lawmakers, however, pushed through legislation in 2025 removing the college-issued IDs from the list of acceptable identification, arguing that they weren’t subject to the same “rigor” as driver’s licenses.

Young found that it was inconsistent for the state to ban the college-issued IDs for voting while still permitting the use of identification issued by the Veterans Administration, military and Native American tribes, “many of which are less uniform than student IDs.”

“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 and that has been accepted as a form of voter identification for nearly two decades,” Young wrote.

Two groups — Count Us IN and Women4Change Indiana — and Indiana University student Josh Montagne filed the lawsuit in May 2025, alleging that the ban in Senate Bill 10 “deliberately abridges young voters’ right to vote.”

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office, which has defended the ID ban in court, said Wednesday it intended to appeal the judge’s ruling.

“Indiana’s voter ID law is critical to election security and integrity,” the office said in a statement. “Courts shouldn’t be watering the law down by doling out special exemptions to some students and faculty. We’ll keep fighting to uphold commonsense election rules.”

The office had maintained in court filings that the ban “does not burden the right to vote.” It argued that any burden created by the change is “minimal” and that only a small number of voters who previously relied on student IDs would be affected.

Young, who was nominated as a judge by President Bill Clinton in 1998, estimated in his ruling that about 40,000 Indiana students would be impacted by the ID ban. An expert for the plaintiffs said that number could reach 90,000.

The judge’s decision also cited a Monroe County election supervisor estimate that two-thirds of voters at polling locations on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington used student ID to vote in 2024.

“SB 10 marked the first time that Indiana singled out a previously acceptable form of ID and barred its use at the polls,” Young wrote. “Students are the only group that are told that their widely held, government-issued ID cannot be used to vote.”

The ruling said supporters describe the law as an election-integrity measure but “there is no evidence that student IDs have been used to engage in voter fraud or any other voting-related misconduct.”