Democracy in the Hoosier State will live another day after a federal judge declared Indiana's "ballot selfies law" unconstitutional. The measure barred constitutionally protected speech, US District Judge Sarah Evans Barker ruled while blocking Indiana from enforcing the measure that carries up to 30 months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Indiana lawmakers approved the legislation, which became effective July 1, based on the contention that a ban would prevent vote buying and voter coercion while maintaining the integrity of the electoral process and secrecy of voters' ballots. The American Civil Liberties Union sued to overturn the measure, which banned photographing your marked ballot and distributing it "using social media or by any other means."

"The State has entirely failed to identify any such problem in Indiana relating to or evidencing vote buying, voter fraud, voter coercion, involuntary ballot disclosures, or an existing threat to the integrity of the electoral process," the judge ruled (PDF) this week.

The decision calls into a question a variety of state laws nationwide barring similar practices.

Judge Barker quoted a passage from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' dissenting opinion in the 1928 case in which the high court approved warrantless wiretaps. (The decision was overturned in 1967.)

Barker said:

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

The judge then added some of her own eloquent words in a roundabout way as saying Indiana lawmakers were clueless: "Over the course of the eighty-seven years that have passed since he sounded this warning, neither the truth nor the importance of his observation has waned. If anything, they have increased and expanded and, as is apparent from the issues before us in this litigation, assumed a new urgency."