Wanted to talk about the huge win for democracy enthusiasts in Pennsylvania yesterday, because voter suppression is bigger than a single state or a single law.
Conservatives and Republicans lost this round for two reasons: incompetence and overreach.
Governor Corbett put the law in place months ago, and then he and his appointees did absolutely nothing to facilitate an orderly revamp of the election system until they were sued. Meanwhile, people in Pennsylvania were navigating their way through several state agencies encountering absolute chaos while the litigation dragged on and Governor Corbett and his appointees frantically changed the rules in a futile effort to save the law for the 2012 Presidential election. If conservatives and the corporate entities that back ALEC want to radically change an existing state election system, they should probably work on basic management skills first. When state government fails, and county election officials have to step in, as happened in Pennsylvania (and Florida, incidentally) something is going terribly wrong.
The Pennsylvania law they pushed through is one of the most extreme in the country. It hit the groups and geography they targeted: African Americans, Latinos and young people, urban areas, but it also hit random elderly voters and rural poor people. There are many documents that can be used to ID a voter. There’s a long list of acceptable documents in Ohio. Yet, Pennsylvania conservatives set this up so voters had to travel to one or more state agencies to get a photo ID with an expiration date. Is anyone really surprised they weren’t able to issue hundreds of thousands of photo ID’s in 6 weeks?
This law was so extreme and so incompetently executed that it drew national attention, but it also did something else. It forced liberals and Democrats to organize in Pennsylvania around voter suppression with new energy and urgency. While it wasn’t always true that liberals and Democrats made up the entire voting rights coalition (some Republicans at the national level worked to protect or expand voting rights up until the late 1990s) it is true now. There are no conservative or Republican voting rights advocates anymore. They’re gone. The entire GOP and conservative coalition are aligned with the absolute bullshit that is “voter impersonation fraud”, and they’ve completely abandoned any pretense of caring about voting rights. If you’re organizing around voting rights, you’re working with liberals and Democrats, and any benefits of organizing around voting rights will flow to liberal and Democratic causes and politicians. Liberals and Democrats didn’t draw that tight line. Conservatives and Republicans did. They left.
This sloppy, desperate, blatant effort to suppress the vote backfired, big time, and I couldn’t be happier about that.
BGinCHI
So, the GOP goes for blatant short-term gain by trying to make the democratic system less democratic. And the reaction is that the left gets mobilized, causing consciousness-raising in states that are crucial for national electoral politics.
This made for a lot of work for folks who believe in the exercise of a free democracy, but ultimately this is going to have a salutary effect.
Thanks for your posts on this, Kay. You certainly deserve a daytime Emmy, at least.
Steve
“until they was sued”? Kay, I’ve never heard you use this accent before…
Forum Transmitted Disease
It’s too bad that Dems still don’t understand the merits of fighting fire with fire, as now would be a most excellent time to start working on voter suppression efforts to be deployed against GOP voters.
We could frankly use the help in California to push our state Senate over the 2/3 mark, so that we can finally pry ourselves out of the fiscal hole we’ve dug our state into since Prop 13 was passed so many years ago.
Kay
@BGinCHI:
They’re forcing liberals and Democrats to pore over voting lists, and learn the rules, and contact their voters. Meanwhile, they’re raising an entire generation of “voter fraud” activists and paid media shills and lawyers whose work is built around a lie, a fantasy. They left the field. It’s voters and liberals and Democratic advocates.
Punchy
TPM had a blurb yesterday that a voter sans ID would have to sign a affidavit confirming who they are and where they live, etc. If true (and I cannot confirm), why couldn’t they just find a way to undersupply these at polling locations, thus denying/significantly slowing down the voting for everyone in line in this indirect manner?
Undersupplying, of course, only in Democratic districts, natch.
Kay
@Steve:
Hah! I thought I was in a quiet room.
Kay
@Punchy:
They could do that, but they can always do that, run out of ballots or distribute machines in an unequal manner.
In my experience, the people who work at polling places genuinely want to “get people voted”, as poll workers say around here. They’re like people who work everywhere else. They want you done and gone :)
lee
How about we start a campaign to fight “arms bearer fraud” and see how they like that?
flukebucket
Meanwhile, Neal Boortz does a long segment on how small business owners need to call all of their employees together and let them know how many will get laid off if Obama is re-elected and that the owner will definitely let those who obviously supported Obama be the first out the door.
That man and the majority of his callers are despicable people who just don’t know how they are going to make it on 6 or 7 figures a year if big bucks continue buying t-bone steaks and driving Cadillacs.
geg6
@Kay:
It’s also paid huge dividends in enthusiasm among a bunch of people who wouldn’t ordinarily be politically active. I saw personal care home workers and administrators mobilizing to get their people IDs. The NFL Players Association sponsored one of the voter registration/ID events that I worked. I’ve never seen these groups active in an election in my life. And I can’t tell you how much this has pissed of many of the elderly. Just spitting mad, they are and, instead of going to Tea Party rallies, they’re working with Dem activists to make sure they and their friends and neighbors don’t lose their voting rights.
This has really hurt the GOP here in PA, which is why we aren’t a battleground state this year. Lotsa pissed of Keystone Staters, all focusing their ire at the GOP. Mike Turzai got famous all over the state this year, a turn of events he really worked hard to make happen, but I don’t think becoming an infamous piece of shit was really what he had planned.
So happy!
Julia Grey
An affidavit could probably be devised from a plain piece of paper and a couple of poll worker witnesses, but yes, we shouldn’t underestimate the value of slowing down the voting process.
Just the necessity for showing ID in the first place is likely to make the lines long and slow this year.
Vote early when and where you can.
RSR
There are still concerns about the process of asking for ID and educating the poll workers.
Some of these concerns were expressed by KagroX on the 10/2 DailyKos radio show.
All voter outreach groups need to vigorously promote the news that although ID will be requested, ID is not required to vote this year.
geg6
@RSR:
It’s been all over the local news here in Pittsburgh and in big blaring headlines in the newspapers. I expect to see plenty of mobilization to get the word out. It’s been amazing to see the organization and enthusiasm around this issue.
Maude
The internet has done well. Without it, this law might have stood and the Repubs may have stolen the election.
This is great.
catclub
@Forum Transmitted Disease: I assume that a Prop UN-13, to repeal Prop 13, would not pass,
which means it would not get a majority of popular vote.
If that is so, then getting to 2/3 Dems is just fucked up,
but the Californian electorate is even more fucked up.
Violet
Fascinating. I knew it was true, but it’s kind of amazing to see it written out there like that. The GOP has turned into a shrieking, paranoid organization running on fear.
Kay
@geg6:
I can’t imagine why people would be angry when the state forces them to visit one or more state agencies and wait, can you?
There’s no reason they can’t ID people with a whole range of documents they might actually have.
I have to tell you, my daughter was never overtly political, she describes herself as “liberal”, she votes, but this just isn’t what she’s interested in, and she’s fully engaged now. She had to jump thru hoops to qualify to vote in PA, and she is convinced her problems with the public transportion system in Pittsburgh are Corbett’s fault. This has all become very personal to her. She thinks they’re making her day to day life harder deliberately.
Jado
Let me get this straight.
The GOP makes up a lie, generates a law designed to “address” this bogus concern by doing something else entirely, and then doesn’t follow thru and makes a total mess of it.
Sounds like the Iraq war. WMDs, Authorization for use of military force against Iraq resolution, Iraq war & cluster-f aftermath.
Sooo not surprised.
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
Part of it is that elections are generally organized on a county level, and most of the county election officials in the heavily Democratic counties are Democrats. The Republicans can’t force a county election official to underprint ballots or misdistribute them in a way that will help Republicans. They can, however, use their statewide power to make sure that poor, Democratic areas are underserved by places like the DMV that are responsible for the state issued ID cards they’re demanding voters use. That’s why one of the ways the Democrats were trying to counter the ID law was to use some of the county-level organizations they control to issue acceptable IDs.
Bulworth
I’m shocked, just shocked, that a blantantly partisan attempt to suppress the vote, which was rammed down the electorate’s throats with no time or thought given towards implementation of a solution to a non-existent problem has been thwarted by the courts.
Damn activist judges!
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
@catclub:
Amazing they won’t vote for a massive increase in their property tax on top of their huge mortgages. And those retirees who think they can just live out their golden years in their homes they bought in the ’60s and 70s. Selfish bastards. /snark
Honestly, pulling a stunt like that would turn California Red almost over night.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@catclub: An interesting idea. It has not been tried. I can say given what it would do to home values, no, it would not pass.
The path to undoing Prop 13 is an incremental one. One thing I think could pass would be to at least repeal the portion that gives office/industrial/corporate/business/mall properties the same artificially low rates that homeowners get.
But we’re only one seat away from a 2/3 majority in the state, which is what’s needed to raise taxes. Easier just to flip that seat than try to convince 36 million people to take another huge hit on their home values.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@flukebucket:
__
This actually happened in Oct 2008 at a medium sized business a close friend of mine used to work at. The owner went on a long wingnutty rant and then told the employees that if Obama won they could clean out their desks. They did end up laying off about 20% of their workforce over the next 6 months, but I think the Great Recession had a lot more to do with that than anything else.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
This is a conservative area, and we had problems with the Democrats at polling places and on the Board of Election just being weak. There’s no other word for it. They are not (actually) outnumbered, Ohio has a partisan system that allots X number of each in the system, but they felt outnumbered.
We got stronger, more confident people in who wouldn’t be bullied, and it’s better.
Kay
@flukebucket:
I’m morbidly curious about the next couple of weeks. I cannot imagine how crazy they’ll get. I have no earthly idea what they’ll try. It starts to approach that “rational actor” theory, where one can’t predict based on self-interest, or…anything, really.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
AFAIK, a repeal of Prop 13 would be considered a constitutional revision, rather than a constitutional amendment, and would thus require a vote of 2/3 of each house of the Legislature to get on the ballot as well as a majority vote. Besides, there are many parts of Prop 13 that are genuinely popular. I think that a simple repeal of Prop 13 would go over like a lead balloon. We’d need a repeal of only the worst parts. For example, I don’t think you’d be able to get a majority to approve of a complete repeal of the rule limiting property tax increases, but you might be able to restrict it to first home and farms.
amk
Thanks Kay. Lotsa hand-wringing y’day over that ruling. Glad that shite blew up on the thugs’ faces in the most spectacular way. Remember the chestbeating thug who claimed, PA voter fraud – done ?
Linda Featheringill
Hooray for the win in PA!
Pennsylvania Republicans have done a wonderful job of GOTV for the Dems. How nice of them. We should send them a thank you note.
Mnemosyne
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques:
You do realize that Prop 13 applies to all property owners, not just residential owners, right?
The Giant Evil Corporation I work for has been paying the same amount in property tax on their numerous commercial properties since 1978. But, hey, who cares about our public schools as long as Warner Bros., Disney, and Universal don’t have to pay a dime more in property taxes than they were 34 years ago? I mean, it’s not like the population of state has increased in those 34 years or anything, amirite?
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques: As the holder of one of those pay-until-it-bleeds mortgages, I get your point, but the state can’t run a deficit and money to keep our state running has got to come from somewhere.
Before 1980 our state had the nicest infrastructure you could find anywhere. 34 years later and, with few exceptions, every last bit of it is beat to shit, falling apart. Fourteen years ago, my local school district had enough money to build a new high school, which was desperately needed, but not enough to maintain it, so (for example) now the school theater can’t be used during the rainy season because water leaks all over the lighting fixtures (safety last) and floods the stage.
jibeaux
@Punchy: Well, an affidavit is just a sworn statement. There could be preprinted ones, but if you ran out, a piece of paper where you write out that you affirm that you are so-and-so, is an affidavit. Affidavits are usually notarized and that part could be tricky without the ID, maybe the notary signs and writes down what sort of ID, if any, was shown?
Kathi
Mike Turzai did a stupid, stupid thing and I sure was glad to see it. People to whom the voter ID law was a tiny blip on the radar started sitting up and taking notice.
flukebucket
@Kay: I am very curious also. I like to tell people that 12/21/2012 comes after the election but before the inauguration so maybe the Mayans were on to something.
The owner of my company was sitting in my office lamenting the term of Obama and I asked him if he realized that our sales had been more during the 4 years of Obama than they were during the 8 years of Bush and he stuttered and stammered that it had nothing to do with Obama and I asked him then why were we even having the conversation.
I make him much more than I cost him so I am not worried about losing my job. He knows it. I know it. So we are both good.
Violet
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Business owners hire and lay off people based on business needs. If the economy had magically turned around and he needed more employees, he would not have fired those folks and he would have hired more.
The business owner knows this, but hopes him employees are too stupid to figure it out.
Face
I thought I read that in a few states (KS was one, f.e.), proof of citizenship is required to vote. Is this correct? Only those possessing BCs and passports can vote?
There’s no way, if this is indeed the case, that this only affects the Dems. I’d think a million wrinklies itchin to vote for the cracker would have trouble locating a BC or passport.
Anyone up on whether these requirements are in place in any states?
catclub
@Forum Transmitted Disease: My understanding is that most states derive tax income from income tax, and property tax is more local.
California must be different, since apparently prop 13 stops the STATE from raising taxes (via property taxes or something else?). That was the part I intended my prop UN-13
to fix.
Could an amendment that makes it possible for the state to raise taxes without a 2/3 majority pass as a referendum?
burnspbesq
OT:
As expected, the Second Circuit stayed the injunction in Hedges. What was a little surprising was the language in the order (explicitly referencing the Feinstein Amendment, which the District Court studiously ignored) that seems to me to strongly suggest that the district court is going to get reversed. I haven’t looked at government’s stay application, but apparently DOJ got its institutional thumb out of its institutional ass and forthrightly told the Second Circuit what it wouldn’t tell the District Court, I.e., that under the Government’s interpretation of the NDAA and its existing detention authority, the plaintiffs were not at risk.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2012/10/second-circuit-stays-hedges-decision/
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Violet:
__
In this instance if the owner was looking for stupid he should have glanced in the mirror first. Trying to bully people who still have access to a secret ballot doesn’t work very well.
Joey Maloney
Nothing wrong with celebration but IIUC Pennsylvania’s ridiculous law is only on hold until after the election. What are the plans to amend or repeal it?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Win. Commercial real estate changes hands far less often than homes do.
Prop. 13 passed because homeowners wanted to have some idea of what their property taxes would be year to year. Prior to its passage property tax rates were set at whim by county tax assessors.
RSR
btw, I’m in Philly (not far from the New Black Panther Party ‘incident’ location) and voted in the primary. There was no repercussion for not producing ID. Just the usual procedure of look up your name in the roll, and have you counter sign against the signature on file.
It’s my understanding (and confirmed to me by Adam Bonin, election law guru) that everyone is entitled to vote under the standard procedures regardless of possessing ID or not, just as it was in the primary election.
I think the poll workers are supposed to provide you with a fact sheet about ID requirements for future elections if you do not produce ID, but that’s the only repercussion.
flukebucket
Business owners do every thing they possibly can to keep from hiring people. They don’t even want the payroll they have. Employees are a necessary evil and if there is a way for business owners to do more with less that is exactly what they will do.
“From each as much as I can get, to each the least I can possibly give”
Capitalism ain’t rocket science.
geg6
@Kay:
Well, they truly are, kay. She has every right to feel that way because she is correct. They absolutely live for the warm tinglies that making other people, especially those less fortunate or who aren’t their political allies, have miserable lives in as many ways as possible.
And now we have one more pissed off and demographically desirable voter on our side. That’s how you build an incentive for people willing to do grass roots work. Make them aware that these policies impact their own personal bubble. And if sufficiently motivated, they will break out of that bubble, with a mighty roar.
Maude
@burnspbesq:
I just bookmarked it and will read the blog regularly. Thanks for the link.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
California used to have the typical system, where property tax went to local government, income tax went to the state government, and some sales tax went to each. Prop 13 changed that in practice because it upset the balance. It has several provisions, the two most important of which are:
1) As long as a property is held by the same owner, its assessed value can’t go up by more than 2% per year*, regardless of how rapidly property values are rising, and
2) Tax increases of all kinds require a supermajority vote. Most of the time, elected officials are too scared to raise taxes even when they have a supermajority, so they wind up punting and asking for voter approval for tax increases anyway.
In practice that’s starved local governments, so the state government had to step in and distribute money to them to keep them going. Unfortunately, income tax is highly variable, especially given that the 1% tend to get their money from capital gains, which means the state budget goes through big booms and busts, and that winds up whipsawing local governments even worse.
*There is an exception for the value of newly built additions, so adding one room to a house you’ve owned since 1978 might wind up doubling your property tax.
KG
@catclub: we would need an amendment (which would require it going before voters) to change the 2/3 rule. As for Prop 13, the way it works is property tax is basically fixed to what you bought the property for (major benefit for corporations). In order to make up for the disparaties that followed in revenue, the money now all goes to Sacramento and then is sent back out to the counties/cities. It’s a total clusterfuck, but homeowners out here love it like they love their mortgage interest deduction.
geg6
@amk:
Mike Turzai. I’ll never forget and neither will a lot of the people who I helped get IDs and registered over the last several weeks. I can’t think of a more hated politician in PA today, with the exception of Rmoney and Tom Corbett, than Mike Turzai.
sab
I voted early yesterday in urban Ohio. I t didn’t go too badly. I arrived at !0:00 and was done by !!:00. The one thing I noticed that I had never seen before is that there was not one single chair anywhere. Lots of elderly and disabled voters, many with canes and walkers, but nowhere to sit for any of them. Obviously the board of elections had planned for us to be waiting outside (lots of roped off areas in the parking lot) but it was raining and the newspaper was there, so they let us inside. There are some Democrats on the Board of elections that stood by and let this happen. Kim Zurz (our supposed Democrat on the BOE, whose family has a funeral parlor, so she should understand the needs of the elderly)was actually there outside when we left, but she wasn’t worrying about seats for the old folks inside. I won’t forget next time any of these folks run for anything.
geg6
@Joey Maloney:
Well, I don’t expect that to happen unless we can change the fact that the GOP controls both houses of the PA Leg and the governorship.
Plus, the ruling just came down yesterday and we have an election to get through in a month. I’m guessing our pols are thinking that we might wait for the election to be over before deciding exactly what plans they have to change this law.
Hungry Joe
Another problem with un-Propping 13 (for homeowners) is the still-inflated/bubble-y value of homes. Half a million will get you only a modest house in places like San Diego, which means that a lot of people are mortgaged halfway up their eyebrows. A true assessment would result in annual property taxes of $5K (at 1%) or $10K (at 2%) — and these are middle-class people earning middle-class wages. Big businesses and corporations — which Howard Jarvis and his anti-tax pals quietly included in the Prop. 13 “revolt” — need to get booted out from under the 13 umbrella and pay their goddam taxes.
Roger Moore
@Hungry Joe:
I’d also include properties beyond the primary residence. The argument in favor of Prop 13 was that granny was losing her house because her property tax was going up so fast she couldn’t pay anymore. Somehow people losing their vacation homes lacks the same resonance.
Kay
@geg6:
She didn’t explain to me how Corbett changed her route to work (she takes the bus) but she had tracked it down to him, so I imagine it’s funding. There’s is nothing that pisses people off more than a longer or more complicated trip to work, which is what happened. He’s cutting into personal time! Back off!
Hungry Joe
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. And it was, in fact, a good argument — granny (and her middle-age kids) really couldn’t keep up with spiking property taxes; the system needed to be re-jiggered. But 13 happened, with corporations and second-(and third- [!]) homeowners piggybacking.
And the blowback was perhaps even worse: Prop 13 jump-started, or at least mainstreamed, the whole anti-tax mindset.
Linda Featheringill
@flukebucket: #42
“From each as much as I can get, to each the least I can possibly give.”
:-)
Patricia Kayden
“There are no conservative or Republican voting rights advocates anymore. They’re gone.”
Because the more people who vote = the less people who vote Republican. Demographics are not in Repubs’ favor. Wonder what will become of them once the demographics change so dramatically that voter suppression is no longer an option.
DFH no.6
As I commented on ABL’s post about this yesterday, this is, of course, great news for the coming election in Pennsylvania, but I still expect that voter ID laws are here to stay, in some form or other.
This ruling in PA is really just a delay in implementation, because of the malfeasance of the statewide fascists (including the guv) as Kay explicated so well. I don’t expect the requirement for voter ID to be thrown out entirely, though.
And I will be amazed if some more states don’t join in – or at least amend their voter ID regs to pass muster with the courts – over the coming years, particularly because the majority of Americans have little to no problem with requiring ID to vote (they by and large accept the bullshit “you have to have ID to cash a check, why not to vote?” arguments).
Nationally, there is no Constitutional right to vote for citizens – the particulars of voting are given over to the states, though of course there are certain federal requirements that states must follow (such as the provisions for old Jim Crow states).
We can, and should, fight the more egregious fascist voter disenfranchisements – and even work for their elimination in the (very) long-term – but we should also work to ensure that the population of likely Democratic voters who currently lack sufficient ID are able to acquire that ID, because that will be the actual “world of voting” that we’ll be living in for the foreseeable.
I’d love to be proven wrong about that, but that’s how I see it.
amk
@DFH no.6:
+1
Kay
@Patricia Kayden:
I get on these voting rights conference calls occasionally, and I feel sorry for the non-partisan voting rights advocates (League of Women Voters) because they have become partisan organizations inadvertently, through attrition. They’re not comfortable in the role, because 20 years ago EVERYONE was for access to voting.
We all have to pretend “Republicans” are sort of on board, in theory, but really, there are none. There won’t be any in the future, either. They’ve been entirely co-opted and consumed by “voter impersonation fraud”, and there is no voter impersonation fraud. It’s a whole movement built around nothing.
dww44
I’ve no idea if Georgia is a template for how this Republican effort to disenfranchise undesirable voters can be moved along, but it just seems to be way ahead of a lot of other states in ratcheting up the paperwork requirements.
First, we got the photo id requirement out of an entirely GOP controlled state legislature a couple of years ago which has been upheld in the federal courts..
Next we got a major backstop to that requirement with a law that went into effect this July and signed by our governor as the best thing ever to “protect” the identity of all Georgians with the new secure id Drivers’ license.
So, drivers like me whose license was expiring after July 1 had to provide all of the following: renew in person, provide a certified birth certificate, proof to document any name changes (i.e marriage, divorce), Social Security card, and 2 forms of residence address documentation. Even if one has held a drivers license with a photo for decades, one has to start all over again to prove one’s legal identity. All of this is done in the name of complying with the 2005 Federal Real ID Act.
Barry
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: “Win. Commercial real estate changes hands far less often than homes do.”
Far, far, far less, because it can be ‘owned’ by a corporation; property transactions can be done by buying that particular corporation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the several years after Prop 13 saw tens of thousands of single-lot corporate shell corps set up.
Uncle Cosmo
@flukebucket:
This is why the emasculation of time-&-a-half/double-time overtime regulations has been such a disaster for employment. If an employer has to pay premium rates for work beyond 8 hrs/day, there comes a point where it’s cheaper to hire more workers, even though they cost him more (in unemployment insurance & FICA payroll tax if nothing else) than to pay the overtime rates. But if you can force your employees to work longer hours at the same pay rate, there is no financial incentive at all to hire.
Even better, if you can reclassify large segments of your workforce as “exempt”, you can get away with forcing them to work overtime for nothing. I worked for a defense contractor in the 1990s & early 2000s where it was common practice to price contract proposals presuming that each “professional” would work on the 1-2 hours per day beyond the standard 8 hour shift, for no additional pay. (This is over & above the standard practice of drastically underestimating the person-hours necessary to fulfill the contract, all in the name of “competitiveness.”)
pk
What I find strange in all this voter fraud business is how devoid of common sense it is (just like most republican idiocies). I would bet $10,000 that I don’t have that you cannot persuade 50 people to go and vote for your candidate by impersonating someone else. You’d have to add 50 fake voters to a registration list and persuade 50 people to vote under fake names. And what would be the incentive? Money, hookers what? If they truly cared about voting integrity they would make sure that votes were counted correctly by machines.
Bubblegum Tate
Saw an amazing bit of spin on this today: “Democrats’ opposition to these ‘voter fraud’ laws proves that Democrats are the real racists!” Seriously:
geg6
@Kay:
She is correct. It’s a funding issue. They’ve (mostly GOPers, but some Dems, too, like that idiot boy mayor) been on a tear about how expensive it is to have union bus drivers and that it’s those union bus drivers who are causing the state to cut funding for mass transit, which means cutting back the number of stops and routes and how late or early the buses run each day.
James E. Powell
@pk:
Not to mention the fact that once the number of paid fake voters goes over 20, the chances of the scheme remaining secret approach zero.
Mnemosyne
@Hungry Joe:
I am very skeptical of all ballot propositions here in California because we’ve been burned by them too many times before, but if a commercial comes on and tells me that the fucking Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association has a position on one of the ballot measures, I will crawl through broken glass to vote the opposite way.
johnny aquitard
@Steve:
Ohio is right next to West by God Virginny and kay’s no doubt been spending lots of time in the south-eastern corner of the state.
Don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the warsh.
John Rohan
Sorry to break up this party for a bit, but that is simply not true. For voting, Pennsylvania accepts any issued State or Federal ID, or even an ID from a State school or hospital.
IOW, if you have a driver’s license, passport, college ID, military ID, or many others, then you can just use those. If you don’t have any of the above, then you can get a voter ID for free.
http://www.dmv.state.pa.us/voter/voteridlaw.shtml
http://www.vficil.org/pages/forum-thread-view?r=FGRHVXHQQA
And BTW, I know this blog automatically assumes bad faith of all Republicans, but reality is a bit different. You might want to know that in 2008, the Supreme Court already declared voter ID constitutional, with John Paul Stevens (one of the most liberal judges the court ever had) writing the lead opinion.
Justice Stevens words:
“Because Indiana’s cards are free, the inconvenience of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required documents, and posing for a photograph does not qualify as a substantial burden on most voters’ right to vote, or represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawford_v._Marion_County_Election_Board
Mike G
Is anyone really surprised they weren’t able to issue hundreds of thousands of photo ID’s in 6 weeks?
You’re presuming they actually wanted it to be functional.
The process was deliberately designed to be cumbersome, frustrating and prone to failure. Like most Repuke-run government “services” that don’t benefit rich people.
John Rohan
@Mike G: The actual number is nowhere near that amount. And the law was passed in March, so that would have given them 8 months, not 6 weeks.