The right call
Forget the candidates, Pennsylvania voters who won’t be required to show photo ID at the polls during the May 21 primary, came out the real winners this week.
That’s because lawyers on both sides of a constitutional challenge to the state’s notorious Voter Identification Law agreed that the ill-conceived statute would not be enforced as voters pick candidates for elective offices that include a single opening on the state appellate-court bench, mayorships, county judgeships and thousands of other local elective offices.
“At this point we just don’t see the [need] to litigate the issue,” Senior Deputy Attorney General Patrick Cawley told the Associated Press.
That’s putting the cart well before the horse. The litigation, let alone the statute, shouldn’t exist in the first place.
The law’s Republican authors were never able to prove that the problem that the statute was intended to prevent — voter impersonation — existed at the pandemic levels needed to justify the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters who just happened to be Democrats.
House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny, exposed the naked political motivations behind the law when he admitted last June before a gathering state Republicans that it would “allow” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to win the state.
Turzai’s televised remarks, which were played on an endless loop on cable news shows, had the unintended consequence of energizing Democrats lulled into a false sense of security by President Barack Obama’s poll numbers in the state.
And as a Commonwealth Court case so amply demonstrated last year, state officials bungled implementation of the law from start to finish.
Among the flaws exposed in Judge Robert E. Simpson’s courtroom was the shoddy training for front-line PennDOT employees charged with issuing acceptable identification. More than one witness testified to the difficulty of obtaining ID from the agency’s motor-licensing centers.
It was also shown that state officials would be unable to get proper ID into the hands of voters who needed it in time for last November’s general election.
So as voters head into the polls in May, the status quo that existed during last November’s election will prevail: They will be asked to show photo identification but will not be barred from voting if they do not have it.
“We don’t have an option of not asking,” said Jeffrey Greenburg, Mercer County’s elections chief and chairman of the Western Pennsylvania Election Personnel Association, which represents counties in the western half of the state.
However, people voting in a polling place for the first time are required under existing law to show identification, although non-photo IDs including a firearm permit or a utility bill are acceptable.
Overall, the voter ID law is a ridiculous charade that one hopes will end with a judge’s finding that the measure, like Turzai’s remarks, should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
– The Patriot-News