Even as the fate of Pennsylvania’s new voter-identification law plays out in a Harrisburg courtroom, an election official in Delaware County is vowing not to enforce it. Christopher L. Broach, a Democratic inspector of elections in the tiny borough of Colwyn, said he would not ask voters to prove who they are on Election Day. “To ask me to enforce something that violates civil rights is ludicrous and absolutely something I am not willing to do,” Broach said Thursday in an interview. An IT consultant, Broach was elected inspector of elections but has recently acted as judge of elections to fill a vacancy. He called the law a ploy by the Republican-controlled legislature, “a wholly unethical decision that violated civil rights for the sake of getting Mitt Romney elected.”
Though Broach is the only official publicly taking such a stance, Philadelphia’s nonpartisan Committee of Seventy received a call from a Pittsburgh poll worker saying he, too, plans not to demand photo ID from voters he knows. The law has set off defiant talk among voters as well, with a few vowing to vote without the required forms of photo ID. “If I get turned away from the polling place,” said Democrat Jean Yetter, 65, of East Stroudsburg, “I will never vote again.”
The talk isn’t all from Democrats. In Radnor Township, Jane Golas, a Republican inspector of elections, said she wondered how she could ask anyone for identification when she will have to count ballots of absentee voters who are not held to the same standards. “This is a move by people to suppress the vote in the city of Philadelphia,” Golas said. “We never had an issue with people coming in to fraudulently vote.”
Full Article: Delco election official vows to defy ID law.