Tomorrow the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania will hear a challenge to the state’s new voter ID law from the ACLU and other voting rights groups. The lead plaintiff is Viviette Applewhite, a 93-year-old great-great grandmother who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Applewhite worked as a hotel housekeeper and never had a driver’s license. Four years ago, her purse was stolen and she lost her Social Security card. Because she was adopted and married twice, she cannot obtain the documents needed to comply with the state’s voter ID law. After voting in every election for the past fifty years, she will lose the right to vote this November. The ACLU will argue that Pennsylvania’s voter ID law needlessly disenfranchises voters like Applewhite and violates Article I, Section 5, of the state constitution, which states: “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” As in Wisconsin, where two federal judges have blocked that state’s voter ID law, the Pennsylvania Constitution affords strong protections to the right to vote. (The Justice Department is also investigating whether the law violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.)
Recent developments in Pennsylvania have transformed the debate over voter ID laws locally and nationally. The first turning point came last month, when Pennsylvania GOP House Leader Mike Turzai said the voter ID law “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Turzai’s comment clarified, once and for all, the real intent of GOP-backed voter ID laws. They’re not aimed at combating the phantom menace of voter fraud—indeed, Pennsylvania just admitted in court filings that there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania”—but rather at suppressing Democratic turnout in order to benefit Republican candidates.
The second turning point came a few weeks later, when the Pennsylvania Transportation Department found that 9.2 percent of registered voters, 758,000 Pennsylvanians, don’t have the state-issued IDs required to vote under the law. The number of voters without ID was larger than the margin of Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain in Pennsylvania in 2008. That bombshell contradicted Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele’s oft-repeated claim that 99 percent of eligible voters possessed the requisite IDs. The Department of Transportation didn’t release the exact demographic breakdowns of who did not have IDs, but it did find that 18 percent of voters in Philadelphia, a heavily Democratic city that is 44 percent African-American, did not have valid state-issued IDs.
Full Article: Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Goes to Court | The Nation.