When I first wrote on this topic it was not the national story it is now. Turzai hadn't yet let the cat out of the bag regarding the voter ID law's true intent, our Secretary of the Commonwealth hadn't yet admitted there are zero examples of in-person voter fraud in PA to point to or that 9.2% of PA's registered voters lack the required ID, and the U.S. Department of Justice hadn't yet initiated its first investigation into a state's voter ID law under the Voting Rights Act in a non-(former-)Jim Crow state: us. It's also been revealed that a Mitt Romney fund-raiser is receiving hard-earned PA tax dollars to execute the voter ID law's public awareness campaign. Yesterday, the Secretary of the Commonwealth had her first press conference since the announcement of the Justice Department investigation, and today will see the first in a series of court hearings about the constitutionality of the law under the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
My first blog about this described an event I attended hosted by the Monroe County (PA) League of Women Voters, at which Republican PA House members from my area answered questions about the voter ID law they supported. They relied almost entirely on telling us there's voter fraud happening we don't know about because it's just that easy, acknowledging its near-complete lack of documented history here in Pennsylvania. When asked about their plans to deal with forms of voter fraud that happen with much greater regularity than the type of in-person fraud the voter ID law was allegedly constructed to prevent - you know, since preventing voter fraud was their huge concern that was supposed to justify this multi-million-dollar, potentially-suppressive policy - they had absolutely nothing to say. I could sense Socrates wince in his grave.
When I first read and then watched and heard the now-infamous clip of PA House Republican Leader Rep. Mike Turzai openly bragging to a Republican Committee gathering that they'd passed the voter ID law in order to make Pennsylvania's electoral college votes easier for Mitt Romney to attain I was almost in disbelief - almost. I was planning on writing about it, but the next thing I knew, it was a huge national story!
But infinitely more important than the mainstream media picking up on a soundbite is that the U.S. Department of Justice is continuing to gain momentum from standing up to voter suppression efforts in Florida and elsewhere this year and have started a full investigation into whether this PA law will have a disproportionate racial impact.
According to TPM, "DOJ’s probe marks the first time it has publicly acknowledged a formal investigation of a voter ID law passed in a state which is not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act." States covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act include former-Jim Crow states, giving Pennsylvania the less-than-honorable distinction of being the first non-(former-)Jim Crow state to have this voting law reform officially investigated for having a disproportionate racial impact.
Am I the only one who thinks that's a really big deal? I don't think I've heard that point discussed on cable news outlets at all.
A few months ago, I had accepted that this law was going through and there was nothing I could do about it. Now, we who opposed this law on voter suppression grounds have been at least partially vindicated, and the process is only just beginning.
Yesterday was probably the single biggest news day this story's had yet. While the NAACP, labor groups, and bused-in grassroots activists from around the state held a rally on the capital steps against the voter ID law, Pennsylvania's Secretary of the Commonwealth held a press conference about the Justice Department's investigation as well as the week of Commonwealth Court hearings set to begin today in which the ACLU is claiming the voter ID law violates the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Above photo courtesy of NewsWorks, whose article is the "rally" link above
Here are some tweets from the event:
And here are YouTube videos posted by The Pennsylvania Progressive, including Aichele's entire press conference and another short one with Pennsylvania Democrats that took place afterward. (You can check out his YouTube channel for videos of the rally and other great stuff.)
I'm not exactly an unbiased observer, but some of Secretary Aichele's points seemed downright absurd to me.
Although she later acknowledges the widely-reported figure of 750,000+ registered PA voters lacking the required ID, at around 2:20 in Part 2 she begins her kind explanation to the reporters that each ID that's free for a Pennsylvanian will cost the state about $13.50, and there's $1 million set aside for free ID's, which would mean we can afford to give about 80,000 - 85,000 Pennsylvanians who need this ID access to it and, in turn, their voting rights. The obvious problem she doesn't seem to have much concern for is that by my calculator that would include just under 9% of registered voters who don't have the ID. Is she okay with suppressing the vote of 91% of Pennsylvanians who are currently registered to vote but lack the newly required ID? What about their voting rights?
At around 11:30 in Part 2, Secretary Aichele claims that one reason there are zero examples of in-person voter fraud prosecutions in Pennsylvania is counties don't have the funding for everything they'd like to do, and if they had any voter fraud cases they'd let them go and prosecute murders and rapes instead because that's all they have the funding for. If that were the case, why didn't they pass legislation to create a pool of funds any county can draw on to prosecute legitimate cases of in-person voter fraud? Why, instead, did they pass legislation without adequate research that will disenfranchise over 9% of registered voters in Pennsylvania of their voting rights?
Shortly after that, at around 13:10 in Part 2 and again at around 2:30 in Part 3, Secretary Aichele reveals how she arrived at the original figure she gave for how many registered voters in PA lacked ID, which was 1%. She said she took the 2010 Census which stated there are 9.6 million voting-age Pennsylvanians who are U.S. citizens and divided that by 9.5 million voting-age Pennsylvanians in the PA Department of Transportation database. She also said that there are 8.2 million registered voters in PA. Why on Earth would she go exclusively off numbers of voting-age people with ID to make an official claim from the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth about how many actual registered voters actually have ID? Is there an option other than woeful incompetence or voter suppression?
Aichele and I agree on a crucial point that she returns to multiple times throughout the press conference, though for different reasons. She says that even though there have been zero in-person voter fraud prosecutions people still worry about whether voting matters, and continually refers back to her role trying to convince young people of the importance and power of voting.
There's no doubt in my mind that every Pennsylvanian and every American needs to understand the importance and power of voting. Drastically different budgeting priorities between Democrats and Republicans and their impact on society and people's daily lives on both the state and national level could take up a blog unto itself.
Still, I'm thinking few things make people realize how important their right to vote is than their government trying to take it away.
If you don't mind, please help me expand my online political network by following my account here at Daily Kos and/or my Twitter account @ProgPatriotPA, in both cases I will follow back! There's also a DKos Pennsylvania group you can follow that I try to update every day with all of Daily Kos' PA-related diaries.