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Democratic Supreme Court justices slam PA voter ID law, lawyers ask for injunction
Lawyers asked PA Supreme Court to issue an injunction blocking the state's controversial law requiring voter ID from going into effect before November's presidential election.
Democratic Supreme Court justices slam PA voter ID law, lawyers ask for injunction
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Lawyers this morning asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to issue an injunction blocking the state's controversial voter ID law, which could disenfranchise tens or hundreds of thousands of voters by requiring that they present ID at the polls, from going into effect before November's presidential election.
“The vice is not in requiring photo identification,” plaintiff's lawyer David Gersch told the six justices. “The vice is in requiring photo identification that people don't have, and have a hard time getting.”
And unlike laws in Virginia, which mails every voter the necessary ID, the Pennsylvania statute does not guarantee voters the ID they need to vote as a matter of right. It is uncertain when the court will issue its ruling. Outside the hearings, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous led a protest against the law.
Democratic justices hammered government lawyers defending the law, questioning the impact on voters and why the state could not wait until after the election to implement it. But the court is evenly split between the two parties (Republican Justice Joan Orie Melvin faces corruption charges and is suspended) and a 3-3 ruling will uphold the lower court judge who refused to issue an injunction. Everyone is watching to see if one or two Republicans, particularly Chief Justice Ron Castille and Justice Thomas Saylor, will join the court's Democrats to block the law's implementation.
Earlier this year, Castille voted with Democrats to strike down a Republican-drawn redistricting plan.
Castille was quiet during oral arguments today, but Saylor expressed strong concerns that the state is not automatically issuing PennDOT IDs as required by the law, which stipulates that someone unable to prove his or her identity can receive a PennDOT ID by signing an affidavit. It turned out that PennDOT cannot issue IDs to such people because doing so would render all PennDOT identification “insecure” for purposes such as boarding an airplane. In response, the Department of State recently began issuing “voter-only” IDs, which are not specifically mentioned in the law.
“You can't comply with the letter of the law, is that what you're saying?” Saylor asked government lawyers.
Republican Justice Michael Eakin seemed supportive of the law, admonishing Democratic Justice Seamus McCaffery for lecturing government lawyers on the non-existence of voter fraud.
“There has been fraud since George Washington ran and there will be fraud 200 years from now. I'm not sure what the question was, if there was a question.”
Justice McCaffery was unequivocal, saying that it “seems like it creates an additional qualification to get into the voting both, and if that's the case, it's unconstitutional.”
“Nobody's saying there is any fraud,” he continued later on. “There's no fraud, is there?”
McCaffery also suggested that the law was passed for partisan political gain, alluding to Republican House Majority Leader Mike Turzai's infamous boast that voter ID would win the state for Mitt Romney.
Meanwhile, Chief Deputy Attorney General John G. Knorr drew laughs from observers when he said that the burden of acquiring an ID “seems to me to be quite minimal.”
Knorr also complained that there “are a lot of very scary numbers thrown around” as to how many people may lack ID. Democratic Justice Debra Todd responded that “they're big numbers.” Knorr at one point suggested that the two might be “having a communication problem.”
Gersch, who represents clients who could initially not secure the necessary photo identification after great effort, argued that the law imposed an undue burden on voters given that there were no proven cases of voter fraud ― a point conceded by Commonwealth's lawyers. They argued that the lower court erred in not applying “strict scrutiny” to test the law, under which it must be “narrowly tailored to serve any compelling Commonwealth interest.”
Further, they argued that it was wrong for the lower court judge to have applied Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a 2008 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter ID law. This case, Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, rests on the Pennsylvania state constitution, which very explicitly guarantees the right to vote, and not the federal constitution.
The lawyers defending the law did not exactly defend it: They mainly said that, whatever the law's merits, it should survive a constitutional test. Alfred Putnam Jr., a lawyer for Gov. Corbett, told the court that, as there could not be evidence of voter disenfranchisement before an election, they should not issue “an injunction on a speculative case.” Putnam, alongside Knorr, argued that the court must err toward granting the legislature, and the lower court, deference. And he seemed to blame the news media, which has extensively covered the potential for disenfranchisement and the great difficulties people have accessing ID, for fomenting discontent over the law.
They argued that while the right to vote was fundamental, it was different from other such rights because elections by their very nature require state involvement and regulation.
Justice Todd was caustic in her criticism of the state, saying the ordeal necessary for some to access ID “sounds a little bit like a nightmare.”
Indeed, volunteers throughout the state are scrambling to educate voters about the new voter ID requirements and help people get those IDs. Civic and civil rights activists are struggling to find the hundreds of volunteers they need in Philadelphia alone.
City Paper has reported and broke news on the twists-and-turns of the law: Gov. Corbett hired a Mitt Romney fundraiser, pharmaceutical lobbyist and school voucher advocate/middleman to assist a voter ID PR campaign; the number of Pennsylvanians who potentially don't have ID more than doubled to 1,636,168; Corbett admitted that he didn't understand the law; and City Commissioner Al Schmidt's report on voting irregularities was brazenly mischaracterized by state Republicans.
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