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Philly mobilizes to get voters ID ahead of Supreme Court argument
Activists redoubling efforts to ensure that everyone has ID necessary to vote under controversial new law. They need more volunteers.
Philly mobilizes to get voters ID ahead of Supreme Court argument
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Fifty-five days before the presidential election, Philadelphia civil rights, labor and civic activists are redoubling their efforts to ensure that everyone has the identification necessary to vote under the state's controversial new law. And they need more volunteers.
“It is onerous, it is unnecessary, and it does create a variety of barriers,” Mayor Michael Nutter told a room packed with representatives of organizations ranging from civil rights groups like the NAACP and National Action Network to the civic-minded League of Women Voters and Committee of Seventy. “But we have to deal with it.”
On Thursday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will decide the law's legality. The court's six-person membership is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans thanks to the suspension of Republican Justice Joan Orie Melvin, who faces corruption charges. A split decision will reaffirm a lower court's ruling upholding the law, and all eyes are watching to see if Chief Justice Ron Castille, the former Philadelphia District Attorney, is a possible swing vote.
The law, which Pennsylvania Republican House Majority Leader Mike Turzai boasted would allow Mitt Romney to win the state in November, could disenfranchise tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of voters. And so the PA Voter ID Coalition is taking no chances, mobilizing volunteers citywide to educate voters about the new requirement and help transport those without IDs, including the frail and elderly, to PennDOT offices.
Today's meeting was at times chaotic, as frustrated people complained that not enough was being done to help their communities. Coalition leaders responded that there were no resources outside of those provided by the member organizations represented in the room.
The anxiety in the room also reflects rampant and increasingly Kafkaesque confusion: over what sorts of ID you can use (like PA IDs, passports, or student IDs with an expiration date) and those you cannot (like out-of-state IDs); what documents are necessary to receive identification, requirements that the Pennsylvania Secretary of State has altered with great frequency; and from PennDOT employees, who have given voters contradictory messages.
“There is discretion at various PennDOT license centers,” said Ellen Kaplan of the Committee of Seventy, and people are getting “different answers” from different people.
And PennDOT employees, according to reports, have sent voters seeking identification home who were mistakenly not listed as registered to vote.
“There's a big disconnect between Harrisburg and the field,” said Joe Certaine, managing director under former Mayor John Street and a leader of the Voter ID Coalition. Sometimes new rules are issued and “the people in those [PennDOT] offices haven't heard it.”
Marian Schneider, a lawyer with the Advancement Project who argued the case before Commonwealth Court, said that PennDOT should issue voter-only IDs to anyone who requests them and that the agency is required by federal law to register unregistered voters on the spot.
“They should not be turning anyone around for not being registered,” said one Philadelphia City Commission staffer in the crowd.
The city is a member of the coalition, and is distributing educational fliers to rec centers, senior centers and other municipal buildings, educating block captains, and has instructed 311 operators to assist callers. The Democratic Party of Philadelphia is educating voters on the ID requirement, and Mayor Nutter reported that the city's Republican Party is too.
Nutter has asked Republican Governor Tom Corbett to extend PennDOT hours, improve training, and to open special voter ID windows, new temporary neighborhood satellite offices, and mobile units. PennDOT yesterday announced that it would extend Thursday hours at five Philadelphia locations, a move that Nutter called insufficient.
More volunteers are needed to canvass the city, focusing on the poor, black and Latino neighborhoods that data indicates have the highest numbers of people lacking ID, Joe Certaine told the crowd. He chided some organizations for being eager to denounce the law at press conferences and then failing to send volunteers.
Committee of Seventy Director Zach Stalberg added that they “would love more tangible support from” City Council offices. And he urged the politically fractious City Commissioners office—divided three ways between reform Democrat Stephanie Singer, long-time incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark, and reform Republican Al Schmidt—to “function more as one unit.”
There is a growing worry that the voter ID law could sow chaos on election day—and in the days after—here and around the country.
Since voters without the mandated ID will be allowed to vote with provisional ballots, which must later be verified, things could get sticky if there are drawn-out legal fights over whether to count a huge number of these ballots. They could, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette points out, become the hanging chads of Pennsylvania 2012.
“In any of these states there is the potential for disaster,” Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law told The New York Times on Sunday. “You have close elections and the real possibility that people will say their votes were not counted when they should have been. That’s the nightmare scenario for the day after the election.”
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