A federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton blocked Indiana from enforcing a 2025 law that removed college-issued student identification cards from the state’s list of acceptable voter identification, issuing a preliminary injunction Tuesday that state officials say they will immediately appeal.
U.S. District Judge Richard Young ruled that Indiana Senate Bill 10 “is probably unconstitutional,” finding that it imposes unlawful burdens on students and young voters in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The ruling bars the state from enforcing the law while the case proceeds.
SB 10, passed by the Republican-controlled Indiana legislature last year, stripped student IDs from the state’s approved voter ID list. Student IDs had been accepted in Indiana for nearly two decades, provided they included the voter’s name, photograph, expiration date, and were issued by a state or federal institution.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office announced Wednesday it plans to appeal.
“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.”
Republican state lawmakers who backed SB 10 argued that student IDs lack the same verification rigor as Indiana driver’s licenses and state-issued identification cards. Young rejected that reasoning, pointing out that Indiana still accepts military IDs, Veterans Administration cards, and tribal IDs, which he wrote 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.
The lawsuit was filed in May 2025 by advocacy groups Count US IN and Women4Change Indiana, along with Indiana University student Josh Montagne. Montagne had used his IU-issued student ID to vote three times but said he had no other qualifying identification after SB 10 took effect.
Court records show that nearly 200,000 students attend Indiana public universities whose IDs previously met the state’s voter ID standard. A Monroe County election supervisor estimated that roughly two-thirds of voters at an on-campus Indiana University polling place used student IDs during the 2024 general election.
Young acknowledged that granting the injunction would override a law passed through the democratic process but wrote that “Indiana has no valid interest in enforcing ‘a statute that is probably unconstitutional.'”
He stopped short of ruling on a separate claim that SB 10 intentionally discriminates based on age in violation of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, saying that question did not need to be resolved at this stage.
