AMY GOODMAN:
We’re on the road in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the sixth city of our
100-city Silenced Majority community media and college tour. Tonight
I’ll be speaking at
Oberlin College at the First Church at 8:00; tomorrow, Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio, that’s at noon; and we’ll also be in
Athens, [Ohio], at University of Ohio on Saturday night.
Cleveland and
other cities are coming up.
As we turn now to our first segment. With less than two months to go
before the November 6 election, we begin today’s show with a look at a
new voter ID law here in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Studies
have shown as many 750,000 eligible voters in the state do not have an
acceptable ID under the new law, which requires all voters to show a
state driver’s license, government employee ID, or a non-driver ID card
issued by the state. In Philadelphia, it’s been estimated 18 percent of
voters lack the proper ID. At least one Republican politician has
already boosted that the new voter ID law will help Mitt Romney win the
state.
STATE REP. MICHAEL TURZAI: Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania—done.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, a Republican.
On Thursday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard arguments on
whether to allow the controversial law to go into effect or to approve a
preliminary injunction. One plaintiff in the case is longtime voter
Wilola Lee, who was born in rural Georgia before moving to Philadelphia
in 1957. In this video produced by the
ACLU, she explains how she cannot get a photo ID because Georgia kept no record of her birth.
WILOLA LEE:
I used to work on the polls, handed out the literatures for people to
vote. Well, I’ve been voting ever since I was 18, mm-hmm. I won’t be
able to vote, because I don’t have the proper photo ID. I’ve been trying
for 10 years to get my photo ID. And behind it, I was been born in
Georgia. And for some reason, they say that they can’t find it. I don’t
think it’s fair. I really don’t really believe that it’s really, really
fair, because I feel as though there’s so many people that can’t get
their—you know, get their photo IDs. And it’s not fair to them, you
know, some people that’s been voting for so many years, you know, that
they can’t vote now.
AMY GOODMAN:
That’s Pennsylvania resident Wilola Lee. Meanwhile, the state of
Pennsylvania has begun airing television advertisements like this one,
that are meant to simply inform those who have an ID to bring it with
them to the polls.
AMY GOODMAN:
Well, for more on the controversy over Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, I’m
joined by two guests. In Philadelphia, Vic Walczak is with us, the
legal director for the state’s
ACLU, one of
the co-counsels on the case argued before the state Supreme Court on
Thursday. And here in Pittsburgh, Jessie Allen, assistant professor at
the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She has litigated voting
rights cases in federal courts in the past and recently wrote an
op-ed for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
called "Look at the History of Voter ID: A Case Cited to Support
Pennsylvania’s New Voter ID Law Instead Calls It into Question."
We welcome you both to
Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Vic
in Philadelphia. You just argued this case before Pennsylvania’s Supreme
Court. Explain what happened yesterday in court.
VIC WALCZAK:
Well, it was a good argument. The justices were very well prepared.
They were very interested in what was going on. And there have, at this
point, been thousands of pages of legal argument filed in the various
briefs, but the inescapable point that’s out there is that, thus far,
since March, the state has only issued about 7,000 IDs to vote, and even
the lowest estimate of people who don’t have ID in the state—and this
comes from the state—is 100,000. And the state has said repeatedly they
don’t expect to issue more than a few thousand more IDs. So you’re
looking at a huge gap in the number of people who don’t have the kind of
ID they need to vote. So, come Election Day, it’s going to be a mess.
And that number could be as high as a million people here in
Pennsylvania.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the questioning on the part of—was it a six-judge panel?
VIC WALCZAK:
It is a six-judge panel. Ironically, one of the seven justices has
stepped down temporarily. She’s a justice out of Pittsburgh. And she has
been indicted on campaign-related fraud. So, certainly, there is fraud
related to elections, but the kind of fraud that would be prevented by
photo ID is virtually nonexistent.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was the questioning on the part of the three Republican, three Democratic judges? Where were they going yesterday?
VIC WALCZAK:
Yeah, the justices—the Democratic justices were really pointing out
that there’s no reason for this law to be in effect this November, given
that the state has admitted that they don’t have any examples of
impersonation voter fraud. In fact, they signed a court-binding
agreement in which they admitted that even if the photo ID law is
blocked, that will not increase the likelihood of fraud at the polls on
Election Day. So there’s really no reason to have this election—and
another one of the justices kept pointing out that the estimates of the
number of people who are going to be disenfranchised could be way, way
over 100,000 and really closer to a million.
The only Republican justice—and it is split three to three—and if
there’s a tie, that means we lose, the challengers of this law lose, and
the law will be in effect in November. The one justice who was asking
questions, I think, really was getting at the nub of the issue. There is
a provision in the statute that suggests that every voter needs to have
the right kind of ID on Election Day, and he was pressing the lawyers
for the state about whether the state could really meet that
requirement. And very candidly, the state’s lawyers said that they could
not meet that requirement. So I think it’s given us a little bit of
hope that we may be able to get this injunction before November.
AMY GOODMAN:
I want to play a comment from another of the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s
case, Viviette Applewhite, 93 years old. She has voted in nearly every
election for the last 60 years. She’s tried for years to obtain photo
ID, to no avail.
VIVIETTE APPLEWHITE:
Why is voting important to me? Because it gives you equal right to do
things. That’s why it’s important. There are things that we couldn’t do,
my race couldn’t do, when we could vote, we could do. This is what made
it so important to me. And that’s why I wanted to vote in this year’s,
just like I did before.
AMY GOODMAN:
Let’s bring Professor Jessie Allen into this conversation, a professor
at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. How difficult it is to get
voter ID?
JESSIE ALLEN:
Well, I think it’s pretty clear from the evidence that was put before
the courts that not everybody can get this ID, and furthermore, that the
people who don’t have this ID are not randomly distributed, that it’s
generally harder for poor people, people who don’t drive, people who
live in urban centers, to—they’re less likely to have the requisite ID
already, and it’s more difficult to go through what you need to to
obtain it.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you have argued cases before, and you refer back in your
op-ed piece,
"Look at the History of Voter ID: A Case Cited to Support
Pennsylvania’s New Voter ID Law Instead Calls It into Question," you go
back a century.
JESSIE ALLEN:
Yes, well, you know, this isn’t a new thing, the idea that voter
regulations that ostensibly are created to improve election integrity
actually wind up creating less democracy, eh? And the irony here is that
an 1869—an old case that the trial court judge relied on to uphold the
current voter ID, actually, if you read the entire case, is shockingly
overtly biased.
AMY GOODMAN: This is a case from 150 years ago.
JESSIE ALLEN:
Yeah, 1869, probably not coincidentally shortly after the 15th
Amendment had been passed by Congress. So, the point is that this is a
very old story.
AMY GOODMAN: But what was so biased about that case?
JESSIE ALLEN:
Well, in that case, the court upheld a law that created one set of
registration procedures for the city of Philadelphia and a much easier
set of registration procedures for the entire rest of the state. And
basically, as if that wasn’t plain enough, the court proceeds to say
that the whole idea is that this is going to keep the "rogues and
strumpets" and "the wandering Arabs" of the city of Philadelphia from,
you know, corrupting the election.
So, there’s really two things about this, eh. First, it’s distasteful
to rely on a deeply prejudiced case to uphold the democratic principle
of integrity, supposedly. But more important, I think that case shows
you that, for centuries, you know, courts have sometimes been led to
produce these abstract legal principles, when really what they’re doing
is upholding something that’s very anti-American, very biased. And we
don’t want that to happen again.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a recent comment from Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. During an interview with the
Washington Post, he voiced support for the state’s voter ID law.
SEN. PAT TOOMEY:
The fact is, this is designed to make it very, very easy for someone
who doesn’t already have an ID—and, of course, vast majority of people
do, but there are some who don’t—and so, the law makes it easy for
someone to get an ID. And if you don’t have one on Election Day, you can
still cast a provisional ballot and then demonstrate that you are who
you say you are within a reasonable time period thereafter. But there’s
many different forms of ID that work. The state government is setting up
offices, has set up offices all over the state to allow someone to
obtain an ID for the purpose of voting, at no charge whatsoever. So,
it’s going to be easy, for anybody who wants to, to vote, as it should
be, but it’s going to be a little bit harder for—for the system to lose
integrity, and that’s important.
AMY GOODMAN:
That’s Senator Toomey of Pennsylvania. Vic Walczak, President Obama won
Pennsylvania in 2008 by 600,000 votes. This law could disenfranchise
more than 750,000 voters. So many don’t have voter ID. Is—photo ID. Is
the state even prepared to be able to make this many photo IDs?
VIC WALCZAK:
No. And, Amy, that’s the first time I’ve heard the Toomey clip, and I
am appalled at some of the things that he said. Pennsylvania has the
most stringent photo voter ID law in the country. There are many other
states that have some form of photo ID law, but they all have some
safety valve that will guarantee that people who end up not having ID on
Election Day can still vote. So, for instance, in Georgia, anybody who
doesn’t have ID can vote by absentee ballot. In Pennsylvania, you can’t
do that. In states like Michigan and Florida, if you show up on Election
Day and you don’t have the right kind of ID, you vote by provisional
ballot, but you also fill out an affidavit saying you are who you are,
and if the signature matches with what’s in the voter registration
books, that vote automatically counts. You don’t have to do anything
else. That is not the case in Pennsylvania. If you vote provisionally,
that vote is not going to count unless you go out and get a valid form
of ID within six days of the election. And as we showed at trial, if
you’re starting from scratch trying to get a new ID, that’s going to be
virtually impossible to do.
So—and the number you keep throwing out, Amy, 759,000, is a number
that the state generated. That’s their own number. But it actually does
not include another 700,000 voters where the state could not positively
determine that they have some form of ID. So, even the state’s own
numbers show that it’s over a million people. Now, I don’t think it’s
over a million people that don’t have ID, but if it’s somewhere between
half a million and a million, I would not be surprised. And if it’s a
close election—and I think most people would say it’s likely to be
closer than it was in 2008, when Obama won by 600,000 votes, it could
have an impact on the election. And this year, the hanging chads of
Florida in 2000 could be the provisional ballots of Pennsylvania in
2012, if we have a close election.
AMY GOODMAN:
And Mike Turzai’s comment, the state legislator saying voter ID is
going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania?
VIC WALCZAK: Yeah, that may be the first honest remark I’ve ever heard him make.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Jim Cramer—actually, I’d like to put this question to Professor Jessie Allen—the
CNBC
host who tweeted that his father, a World War II veteran named Ken,
would lose the eligibility to vote under the state voter ID law here in
Pennsylvania because he does not drive, he’s elderly, he can’t prove his
citizenship. Less than seven hours later, the
Mad Money host
tweeted that authorities with Pennsylvania’s Transportation Office came
directly to the rescue of his father. Unfortunately, 750,000 people
don’t have a son named Jim Cramer that they can make the same appeal.
JESSIE ALLEN:
Well, that’s right. And, of course, that’s an old story. Often you have
plaintiffs in the state move to do what they need to do to make those
people OK. But you bring up a big point: this guy is a veteran, right?
Well, apparently, under this restrictive law, a veteran’s ID will not
prove your eligibility, because it lacks the expiration date that’s one
of the requirements. So, you know, what presumably ought to be the best
form of ID, people who served their country in the war, no.
AMY GOODMAN: Why, Vic, does this disproportionately affect the old, people of color, students?
VIC WALCZAK:
[inaudible] who has ID in our society. And there is this belief,
widespread belief—and I think it’s a middle-class phenomenon—that the
vast majority of people have photo ID. And the truth is that the vast
majority of people do. The most common form of ID is the driver’s
license. But, in fact, all the studies that have been done over the last
half-a-dozen years or so, including the one we conducted in
Pennsylvania, shows that between 9 and 15 percent of the population in
fact do not have photo ID. These are not people who drive. They don’t
jump on airplanes and fly to Europe, so they don’t have passports. And
it’s not that these people don’t want IDs. But we actually put a couple
of lawyers on the stand as experts—these are folks who work with
low-income and homeless individuals—and they talked about how difficult
it is to get a photo ID if you don’t have one. People who are African
Americans, predominantly, who were born in the Deep South, in the Jim
Crow South, a lot of times their births were not in hospitals. And if
they were in hospitals, they didn’t exactly care about recording the
births of black people. So those folks can’t get birth certificates.
And what we found in a survey that we did—we polled 2,300 people,
and, as Professor Allen said, what you’re looking at is
disproportionately people of low income. If—people who make less than
$20,000, about a quarter of them do not have the kind of ID that’s going
to work. If you have a high-school education or less, more than 40
percent of those folks don’t have the right kind of ID. And if you think
about who is impacted, it’s people who don’t drive. And where do they
make you go in order to get this ID? To a driver’s license center. And
in Pennsylvania, there are 10 counties where there is not a single
licensing center. There’s another 13 counties where they have one
office, but it’s only open one day a week. That means between now and
Election Day there’s only seven days to go out and get one of these kind
of licenses. So, there are an awful lot of people who don’t have the
ID, who don’t have the documents to get the ID, and don’t have the means
of transportation to be able to get to some of these outlying areas
where you have to go to get it.
AMY GOODMAN:
And yet, amazingly, the Governor Corbett administration, Governor
Corbett of Pennsylvania, initially made what now appears to be a false
claim that 99 percent of the people of Pennsylvania do have the proper
photo ID. When is this court going to hand down its decision? It’s
September already. We’re weeks away from the election.
VIC WALCZAK:
Yes, we’re about seven weeks away from the election. And, I mean,
obviously, trying to predict either when the court’s going to rule or
how they’re going to rule is a fool’s errand, so I’m certainly not going
to predict how they’re going to rule. But our expectation is that they
will rule within the next couple of weeks, two to three weeks. This is a
court that’s used to handling election disputes on the eve of an
election. They realize that there needs to be some certainty, one way or
the other, for not only the voters, but for all the counties that have
to administer these elections. So I’m confident that they will make a
timely decision.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Allen, how this—how your state here, Pennsylvania, fits into the country on voter ID laws?
JESSIE ALLEN:
Well, there’s been a quite a trend toward enacting these laws, but many
of the ones that have been upheld have been much more liberal and
reasonable, in the sense that they allow more kinds of ID, and they
allow people to prove their identity in other ways. This is really, as
Vic said, one of the most restrictive.
AMY GOODMAN:
Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Professor Jessie
Allen teaches at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, and Vic
Walczak is the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in
Pennsylvania. This is
Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’re on the road in Pittsburgh. Stay with us.
