By again tinkering with Pennsylvania’s two-month-old voter-ID law, Gov. Corbett’s administration only makes it more obvious that the hastily imposed statute is as flawed as it is unwarranted. Each time state officials relax requirements for voters to document their identity — as they did last week, for the second time — they call into question the paper-thin reasoning of Corbett and Republican legislators who say they supported the law to thwart a specific type of voter fraud that they could not prove. The governor and his aides, including state elections chief Carol Aichele, insist that the requirement to show government-issued photo identification is needed to prevent what is a virtually nonexistent problem in the state — voter impersonation. Yet there they were last week, announcing that the state would waive the mandate that voters must present a birth certificate when applying for a nondriver state ID card to comply with the voter-ID rules. Won’t that just make it easier for their supposed legion of phantom vote-fraud perpetrators to do their dirty work?
Of course, what’s happening in the face of a convincing legal challenge by 10 voters, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups, over the constitutionality of the law is that the governor is trying to make the voter-ID mandate appear less onerous. Think of it, though, as putting lipstick on a pig — no offense to our farmyard friend.
It doesn’t much matter that the state is loosening the guidelines for getting the proper papers, or that the state Department of Transportation is promising to process nondriver IDs in only 10 days, rather than the months-long wait seen in some cases. The fact remains that voter-ID rules target the fundamental rights of young, minority, and elderly residents, especially in urban areas like Philadelphia, where — surprise, surprise — Democrats expect to pull millions of votes for President Obama in the fall.
Full Article: Voter-ID law is a pig in lipstick.