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In Voter ID case, Pennsylvania GOP finds itself arguing that government isn't the problem.
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In Voter ID case, Pennsylvania GOP finds itself arguing that government isn't the problem.
This afternoon, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a long-anticipated decision regarding Pennsylvania’s controversial requirement that voters bring state-issued photo IDs to polling places. But if you were expecting lofty speeches you were to be disappointed.
The issue at hand turned out not to be what either side framed it as being about — electoral integrity on the one hand, the sacredness of the right to vote on the other; the right of states to oversee elections as they see fit versus the historical need to protect citizens from targeted disenfranchisement; a principled offense over the potential for voter fraud versus a mathematical defense over the likelihood of disproportionate effects on poor, old and minority voters.
No, the main problem the court identified with Pennsylvania's Act 18, supported almost exclusively by state Republicans, was the very thing Republicans in general say they most despise: bureaucracy, government ineptitude and over-regulation.
The court’s decision sends the case back to a lower court for more testimony over whether the law will in fact disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters. The decision suggested that the state will have to prove that voters won't be disenfranchised to persuade the court not to at least enjoin the law until after this November’s election.
In its reasoning, the court focused mainly on what came over the past few months to be the actual content of most of this case: the laundry list of bureaucratic mishaps and government missteps that characterized the state's attempt to help its own citizens comply with the new requirement.
There were the revelations that the Department of State drastically underestimated the number of people who might not have ID before the law was passed; there were the subsequent revelations that it might have underestimated those numbers again, or might not have, because neither the DoS nor anyone else actually knew how many people didn't have proper ID after all.
The Republican-lead administration tried to relax restrictions on Pennsylvania Department of Transportation IDs in order to get them into more hands — but found itself thwarted by pesky Homeland Security requirements that protect the integrity of such IDs, which can get you onto an airplane. The administration then tried, just months before the election, to create a brand new form of ID.
In these and other misadventures the court found a "disconnect in what the Law prescribes and how it is being implemented" as well as "a number of conceptual difficulties" in how the state's proposed measures would actually work. Translation: requiring photo ID might itself be legal, but the state's effort to do it in a way that doesn't disenfranchise voters has been so rushed and half-baked that the Court might block the law for now anyway.
In an opinion dissenting from the decision to send the case back to a lower court, Justices Debra McCloskey Todd and Seamus McCaffery went a step further in arguing that the law's implementation was indeed so flawed that a request for an injunction against it should have been granted on the spot. Calling the state's efforts to loosen ID requirements a "last ditch effort," McCaffery declared that the importance of implementing the law before November's election is "somewhere from slight to symbolic," and that while he *did not* object to ID requirements per se, "it is clear to me that the urgency for implementing [voter ID] ... is purely political."
The majority decision, meanwhile, is asking the Commonwealth to first prove that “no voters will be disenfranchised” — a high bar indeed, and one that may tilt the odds in favor of voter ID opponents.
Meanwhile, there’s a certain irony in the the court’s seeming acceptance of ID requirements in the abstract and potential rejection of it being a requirement this November.
After years of arguing about voter ID as a matter of principle, the mostly Republican proponents of the requirement now face possible defeat, not because their law violates the state constitution, but because its implementation constituted a clumsy, burdensome government requirement that interferes with individual liberties.
Government, the Court has implied, appears to be the problem here, a point which poses a philosophical conundrum for Pennsylvania's GOP — since they're the ones running it.
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