“We Don’t Want You To Vote”: The Deep, Dark Mysteries Of Pennsylvania’s Voter ID Law
There is no clear plan to help Pennsylvanians get the ID now required for voting. Does the state want thousands to simply stay home on Election Day?
Sometimes fearing the unknown isn’t such a bad idea. Like, for instance, when they’re serving “mystery meat” in the cafeteria. Or, on a slightly bigger scale, when your state is considering a new law that could disfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.
Pennsylvania legislators had no such healthy sense of fear when it came to passing the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law just a little over four months ago—practically yesterday, considering the ramifications of such a huge change to election procedures. But when the bill was being debated, lawmakers and state officials supporting the bill insisted it would be a breeze to ensure that no one was disenfranchised; everybody who wanted to vote would still be able to vote. “This is going to be an additional responsibility,” said Daryl Metcalf, the Republican state representative who sponsored the bill, but “one that is not burdensome in any way.” Besides, Republican Governor Tom Corbett’s office said that only 1 percent of Pennsylvanians lacked a valid ID. Even for that 1 percent, Corbett said, “This is no barrier to voting. You have to have a photo ID to go anywhere.” For the scant few presumed to be lacking IDs, the state would provide one free of charge. Easy peasy.
But now, with only three months until Election Day, it’s abundantly clear that things are going to be a lot more complicated. The number of voters lacking the required ID is considerably higher than state officials guessed. The plan for giving out free, new IDs is a complete mess. At best, it looks like the way Pennsylvania enforces the law, which deals with a central right of citizenship, will be a rushed affair. At worst, it will leave thousands, if not hundreds of thousands without a chance to cast a ballot.
While the state defends the law in court, officials are simultaneously scrambling to come up with a public education campaign and make new identification cards widely available. Court proceedings started last week in a lawsuit brought by voting rights groups. Testimony on Friday highlighted just how much is left to do to implement the law—and just how much remains unknown. The stakes are high, as Pennsylvania is a swing state in one of the most contentious presidential elections in recent memory.
Despite the implications, there’s a whole lot we don’t really know about Pennsylvania’s plans for implementing its voter ID regulations. Let’s start with what we do know; it’s scary enough.
First of all, the law is way more complicated than its proponents would allow during the debate. “Photo ID” sounds simple enough, but the state’s law has a slew of specific requirements. For starters, acceptable identification must have an expiration date. That requirement knocks out a variety of IDs that you might expect would be accepted, like veteran’s cards issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It also disallows a lot of college ID cards; while the law allows IDs issued from any state university or community college, most of those IDs don’t currently carry an expiration date. Many colleges are trying to issue new ID cards or put stickers on the old cards with expiration dates, but time is short.
The law has a slew of other caveats and wrinkles. For instance, while identification cards must have an expiration date, those issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation can still be used even if they’re expired—so long as they’ve expired less than one year before November 6. All other forms must still be valid, including passports and military IDs. Employee IDs issued by counties and municipalities are allowed (so long as they have an expiration date), but any other form of photo ID issued by counties or municipalities won’t be accepted. (That means if you were planning on using your gun license, you’d better come up with a new plan.)
We also know that a ton of people will need new or alternative identification with a photo. The Secretary of the Commonwealth’s own study—released long after legislators passed the law—shows that as many as 9 percent of registered voters currently lack an ID issued by the state’s Department of Transportation, the most common form of identification. Subsequent studies have found even more alarming numbers. Matt Barreto, a professor at the University of Washington, found that 12.6 percent of Pennsylvanians who voted in 2008 currently lack a valid ID. An analysis by the AFL-CIO showed that, when you factor in those whose IDs will have expired longer than a year by Election Day, as many as 20 percent of Pennsylvania voters—or 1.6 million Pennsylvanians—could be disenfranchised.
The greatest unknown is how the state plans to ensure these massive numbers of voters can get their identification in time. When the law was passed, state officials said it would be no problem to educate voters and distribute IDs. Already, though, the offices that issue IDs are making mistakes. Friday’s testimony showed that voters were being charged for IDs that are supposed to be free. There’s also a serious concern that poll workers won’t know the rules around the new law; they will not be required to attend training sessions on voter ID, and the state has sent out conflicting information to local election officials.
A plan to offer a new photo ID specifically for voters was supposedly concocted in June, after the lawsuit was filed. Several of the plaintiffs in the suit are senior citizens who do not have birth certificates, or other necessary documents they would need to get a standard state-issued ID. The new voter ID cards, according to state officials, would offer such people an option. But as court testimony made clear Friday, the state has already struggled with delays; the IDs were supposed to be ready last week. Now, one state official testified, they will be ready to go by August 26. But as the plaintiffs’ attorney pointed out, there’s no mention of that date in the contract with the vendor that’s supposed to produce these cards. And there is no penalty if the vendor fails to have the cards ready by then.
State officials say that won’t be a problem. But the legislature only provided funding for 85,000 new IDs. That doesn’t even cover the number needed in Philadelphia alone. But Kurt Myers, the deputy secretary for safety administration, told the court that he expected to issue fewer than 10,000 of the new voter ID cards.
Ten thousand IDs? When hundreds of thousands don’t have them? Were we all absent for math class the day they taught “voter ID counting”?
As it happens, this is not a math problem. It’s a problem of cynical politics. As Barreto found, a third of Pennsylvanians don’t even know about the law. Many will show up at the polls and be turned away. The inevitable delays and arguments will almost surely leave others in line longer—and make it more likely that they’ll leave without voting. The number of Pennsylvanians who vote will almost surely decline. There’s no clear state plan for dealing with voters lacking identification, because, it’s clear, the plan is that many of them simply won’t show up.
Which brings us to the last thing we know: This law is about suppressing the votes of poor and nonwhite voters.
Voter fraud, the ostensible reason for all this, is not a problem in Pennsylvania or in anywhere else in the U.S. This law is about partisan advantage for the GOP, pure and simple. The state has already admitted in court documents that there are no known cases of in-person voter fraud, in which one person pretends to be another. (That’s the only kind of fraud this law guards against.) As Talking Points Memo first reported, Pennsylvania has already signed an agreement with the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, acknowledging that there have been no investigations of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania and that there’s not likely to be any such fraud this November. The state isn’t even going to pretend that voter fraud is a problem—though that was the sole justification for passing this law.
The Republican House Majority Leader in the state already bragged that voter ID would result in a win for Mitt Romney. Left unsaid was that the law would make it disproportionately harder for poor and minority voters who tend to vote Democratic.
This is about politics at the cost of civil rights. That’s one thing we know for sure.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
“Not Even Close”: Newsweek Gets It Wrong, Mitt Romney Is A Bully
Howard Kurtz, whose usual beat (for the last 20+ years) is media reporting, not politics, has a story in this week’s Newsweek claiming that John McCain is desperate to help Mitt Romney, but Romney is apparently not seeking the legendary maverick’s assistance.
The headline says McCain staged a campaign intervention for Mitt Romney, but that apparently happened months ago, during the primaries. (McCain and his BFF/sidekick Lindsey Graham called Romney and told him not to say “self-deport” anymore.)
McCain is I guess disappointed that Romney won’t take his advice on foreign policy issues (bomb everywhere forever) and immigration (be a little bit less anti-immigrant) and also no one invited McCain to speak at the convention.
We get another wonderful iteration of the “Obama failed to reach out to McCain” story:
The other glitch was his strikingly antagonistic relationship with Obama. Despite a fence-mending meeting at the White House last year, the president never called again. McCain contrasts Obama’s aloof approach to lawmakers with that of Bill Clinton, who “was remarkably good to me.” In fact, McCain told me that he and Clinton chatted about policy in occasional phone calls during his 2008 campaign, even as the former president was backing Obama.
I never get sick of hearing this. Obama’s legendary “aloof approach” forced John McCain to be a bitter, petty man who holds grudges forever after minor perceived slights! He only got one invitation to the White House!
I can’t even really figure out the point of this story. At least Kurtz got most of his sources — McCain and Steve Schmidt — to speak on the record, which is better than your average Politico non-story, but it doesn’t really strike me as odd or unusual that Romney is not making a man who lost badly to Barack Obama a major surrogate in his campaign to beat Barack Obama.
It’s especially unsurprising because Romney, a supremely self-confident man, doesn’t care to take advice from anyone not already in his inner circle. He thinks he and his hand-selected staff know best, and he doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks.
That analysis would seem to be contradicted elsewhere in Newsweek (on the cover), where we learn that Romney is actually a “wimp.” How is he wimpy? Well, Newsweek called another guy wimpy once and it got a lot of attention so Romney is also definitely a wimp.
Poor Michael Tomasky is forced to write a Romney analysis shoehorned into a desperate retread of one of the half-dozen Newsweek covers people still sorta remember — the one where they called George H.W. Bush a wimp. It was a silly cover, and one that presaged much of the worst aspects of modern presidential campaign coverage, like the elevation of some amorphous pundit-based “perception” of a candidate over the actual tangible facts of his story and positions. It’s remembered mainly because it made Bush mad (and it should have, the guy was a war hero!). What’s worse about this one is that it’s not even close to being accurate. Romney is indeed a stiff, rich twit, and a guy who was horrible at athletics as a kid, and a guy who says “gee whiz” or whatever, but he’s not a “wimp.” He’s a bully! He bullied other kids in school, he was arrested for mouthing off to a cop who dared to question him on a minor violation, he publicly berated a teenage volunteer traffic cop at the Salt Lake games and then refused to apologize, and he generally loses his temper at any time he’s challenged by anyone he considers a subordinate. And he considers just about everyone a subordinate!
Poor Newsweek! They’ll get this “weird blog that comes out once a week and is on paper” thing right one of these days.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 31, 2012
“Culture And The Hand Of Providence”: On Israel, Mitt Romney More GOP Than LDS
When Mitt Romney claimed “culture” and the “hand of Providence” led to Israel’s economic superiority over the Palestinians at a Jerusalem fundraiser this morning, he was hardly reading from a Mormon script.
Daniel C. Peterson, professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University, editor in chief of the BYU Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, and author of the book Abraham Divided: An LDS Perspective on the Middle East, said in an interview that growing up as a Mormon in California in the 1960s, most Latter-Day Saints were “very militantly pro-Israeli.” That stance has evolved, however, said Peterson, describing the evolution as a “mellowing” as people have gotten to know Muslims and discovered the conflict is “not as black and white as I once thought it was, that there are decent people on both sides. Good people have gotten hurt on both sides.”
Although Mormons believe that God has a hand in returning the Jews to Palestine, unlike many evangelicals who claim to be pro-Israel, Mormons also have what Peterson characterized as a “fairly liberal view of other religions,” including Islam. “We don’t have the same imperative, we don’t have same sense of urgency of getting to people in this life or else they’re going to hell.” As a result, it’s not uncommon in Mormon circles, he said, to hear Buddha or Muhammed described as “inspired,” a view that has “filtered down largely to the rank and file membership.”
What’s more, an important feature of Mormonism is “that Abraham is the father of the faithful and his other posterity also have a role to play and are heirs to promises given to him.” In 1979, the flagship magazine of the Church published an article entitled, “Ishmael, Our Brother,” and has paid “tribute to Muhammed, among other religious leaders, as having received a portion of God’s light used to serve his people, a very positive statement for a Christian group to make, before that was really politically correct.” That was not a break with previous LDS tradition, said Peterson, because “it flows right out of Joseph Smith,” although Peterson noted that he didn’t know how Smith came in contact with teachings about Islam or what he read about Islam.
There are critics, said Peterson, who “think we’re too friendly with Muslims.” Such critics, particularly evangelicals, he said, think “we should be condemning Islam as the religion of the devil, and because we’re not, that goes to prove we’re not real Christians.”
While the Church has, said Peterson, avoided taking explicitly political stands in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—it does not, for example, use the word “occupation” and it does not take positions on proposed political solutions to the conflict—it lays down “broad moral guidelines” about “all God’s children.” The Church is “very concerned that we be seen, for example, in Jerusalem itself as friends to both sides,” something Peterson said the administrators of the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies of Brigham Young University strive for.
While “a Latter-day Saint would find it very hard to be fundamentally critical of the Zionist project because our scriptures talk about the return of Jews to the Holy Land,” said Peterson, “there’s certainly room to disagree about the form that it’s taken or specific policies of the Israeli government. Some are going to be very sympathetic. You take someone like Glenn Beck who’s obviously very closely aligned with the government of Israel but others who are extremely critical and embarrassed that Glenn Beck is a Mormon.” Peterson described Beck as “much more in line with certain militant evangelicals.”
With regard to Romney’s statements about economic disparities between Israel and Palestine, Peterson noted, “There are other factors Gov. Romney should’ve noticed,” including that “Palestinians are not just under occupation but are surrounded by a wall.”
“If I could sit down and talk to him,” said Peterson, “I’d like to say, but Governor, remember, the Palestinians are too from our point of view theologically descendants of Abraham, and they deserve concern and consideration too.” While a Latter-day Saint would believe, as Romney claimed, that “the hand of Providence” is on Israel, Peterson cautioned, “I would be really careful about saying that in a political context, I would really want to balance it out if I were speaking publicly as a politican to express concern and support for legitimate Palestinian aspirations.” Peterson said he worried about Romney’s statements because “I don’t want Mormons to be seen as so pro-Israeli that we discount actual grievances that I think in some cases the Palestinians really have.”
Peterson added that he was worried, as well, about Romney’s reaction to Abraham Hassan, a Palestinian-American (and a Republican) who asked, at GOP presidential debate earlier this year, “How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people?” Peterson described Romney’s response as “fairly dismissive,” and that “I really thought he missed an opportunity there to send a message to the Arab community, which is fairly large, too, that I hear your concerns too. That I regret.”
Peterson added, “I list myself as a political conservative, I am a quite serious conservative, probably more than Mitt Romney is, probably of a peculiar kind. I really don’t like dismissing Palestinian concerns because in many cases they are legitimate.” What’s more, he added, “pragmatically, this is a voting bloc, and some of them have money, and he ought to be thinking about that.”
BY: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, July 30, 2012
“You’re Not Just A Chump”: Mitt Romney Thinks You’re A Sucker
You don’t have accounts in the Caymans? What a chump.
Back in January, when he was asked during a primary debate about the taxes he pays, Mitt Romney made the somewhat odd assertion that “I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.” As I’ve written before, this would seem to indicate that Romney believes that if you don’t have a team of accountants who can ferret out every last loophole to minimize your tax bill then you’re just a sucker, so pathetic that you are unworthy of occupying the highest office in the land. But maybe I was being unfair. After all, I’ve been critical of the campaign habit of reading too much into any particular statement a candidate makes. We all say things that upon reflection we’d like to put another way or take back completely, so maybe Romney didn’t quite mean it the way it sounded.
But once you repeat a statement like that more than once, we can be pretty sure you do in fact mean it. And based on what he said in an interview yesterday with ABC News, we can be pretty sure Mitt Romney genuinely believes that if you paid an extra dollar to the federal government, then you’re not just a chump, you’re such a chump we wouldn’t want you to be president:
From time to time I’ve been audited as happens I think to other citizens as well and the accounting firm which prepares my taxes has done a very thorough and complete job pay taxes as legally due. I don’t pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president. I’d think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires.
Think about this for a moment. Romney thinks that paying more than you owed, or even failing to take advantage of every last loophole and tax shelter you could, is so despicable it’s disqualifying, as though it were a moral transgression on par with, I don’t know, stealing a car or abusing your wife or something.
Not only that, both times he has said this he projects the belief onto other people as well. “I don’t think you want someone” the first time, “I’d think people would want me” this time. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say this has its roots in Romney’s time in the private equity world. If you’re investing with a private equity firm, you want the leader of that firm to be smart, thorough, and ruthless. You want him to squeeze every last penny he can from every available source, and of course minimize the taxes he and you will pay. If he says, “I could have set up an elaborate network of shell companies in the Caribbean, but I decided not to,” you might think he had failed you, since the only goal in the endeavor is to make as much money as possible and keep the government’s hands off it.
But the presidency isn’t the chairmanship of a private equity firm, and maybe, just maybe, the qualities that make one effective at the latter aren’t precisely the qualities we want in the former.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the real issue is that we have a tax system that allows people like Mitt Romney, who takes in about $20 million a year despite the fact that he hasn’t actually held a job in five years other than running for president, to pay a laughably low tax rate, while people who actually work for a living pay a far higher proportion of their income in taxes. Weirdly, Romney thinks that system is just peachy, and he would actually like to tilt it even farther in favor of the wealthy.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 