A judge in Pennsylvania has thrown out Pennsylvania’s controversial voter ID law setting the stage for the Supreme Court to tackle the issue.
On Friday a judge in Pennsylvania threw out the state’s controversial 2012 voter ID law that required all voters in the Keystone State to show government issued identification in order to cast a ballot.
These sorts of laws have been pushed overwhelmingly by Republicans in states all over the country, and to their supporters they are a legitimate attempt to counteract voter fraud by people pretending to be people other than themselves on Election Day. However critics of these kinds of laws point out that this type of fraudulent voting is incredibly rare, indeed in this case the state couldn’t cite one example of someone voting under an other person’s name, and that these laws make it much harder for groups like the poor, racial minorities, and young people to vote. Some of which just happen to be groups that tend support Democrats more than the GOP.
In this case the judge sided overwhelmingly with the critics:
The judge, Bernard L. McGinley of Commonwealth Court, ruled that the law hampered the ability of hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians to cast their ballots, falling most heavily on elderly, disabled and low-income residents, and that the state’s reasons for the law—that it was needed to combat voter fraud—was unsupported by the facts.
In addition the judge ruled that the state’s promised effort to offset this change with a public awareness campaign and free IDs for the poor turned into a total fiasco:
In addition, Judge McGinley ruled, the state’s $5 million campaign to explain the law had been full of misinformation that has never been corrected. He also said that the free IDs that were supposed to be made available to those without drivers licenses or other approved photo identification were difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain.
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The next stop for the case will be the state’s Supreme Court, but this challenge could easily go all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington, setting the stage for a showdown over a number of state’s new voter ID laws.
While the legal matters involved are complex, at some point the issue here is very simple: either you believe in democracy or you don’t. And if you work overtime to try and limit the ability of people who might disagree with you to be able to vote, you are fundamentally working against democracy. Put another way, a democracy that excludes lots of groups from voting can’t be called a democracy forever.
Photo by kahala/Flickr
Nope, disappeared it again. Wuss.
As in no guts for disappearing a comment you obviously have no answer to.
It’s a holiday weekend (MLK) perhaps he’s just taking time off? But then again, maybe not.
No guts.
Looks like you had no answer for the obvious question and disappeared the comment instead. Typical liberal.
Perhaps you cane explain the video shown below?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5p70YbRiPw
“However critics of these kinds of laws point out that this type of fraudulent voting is incredibly rare, indeed in this case the state couldn’t cite one example of someone voting under an other person’s name…”
Or put another way there is overwhelming evidence that these sorts of laws make it harder for some people to vote, while there is no evidence that they stop people from voting under other names. You could easily commit voter fraud with a fake ID for example.
I’m an old guy. Where do you think the phrase” vote early, vote often” came from? My home town, Chicago.
Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and voter fraud watchdog group True the Vote announced Friday they have reached an “historic settlement” in their lawsuit against election officials in Ohio.
The 2012 “Judicial Watch/True the Vote lawsuit charged Ohio election officials with failing to take reasonable steps to maintain clean voter registration lists as required by Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton wrote in a press release.