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Will PA election workers refuse to implement voter ID?
At least one election worker has announced that he will not enforce the voter ID law. Will others join him? Could he go to jail? Plus: high-stakes test cheating and fracking news.
Will PA election workers refuse to implement voter ID?
“Oh no they didn't” is Daniel Denvir's weekly blog post on last week's state politics. Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
"To ask me to enforce something that violates civil rights is ludicrous and absolutely something I am not willing to do,” Colwyn Democratic inspector of elections Christopher L. Broach told the Inquirer last week.
Broach was explaining his decision to not enforce the state's controversial new law requiring voters to present one of a few valid forms of identification at the polls starting this November. Critics say the law is clearly intended to suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning poor, students, elderly and non-white citizens. It could disenfranchise many voters in Colwyn, a small and 80-percent-black borough in Delaware County just outside of Philadelphia.
The state has no idea how many people may be impacted by the law. As many as 1,636,168 registered voters, or 20 percent of Pennsylvania voters, may not have PennDOT-issued ID, according to data obtained by City Paper last week. In Philadelphia, 437,237 people, or 43 percent of city voters, may not possess the valid PennDOT ID. And as House Majority Leader Mike Turzai boasted to Republican supporters, this is a law intended to keep the Democratic vote down.
It would be a simple but vexing act of civil disobedience: when voters go to the polls this November, the neighborhood people who staff polling places throughout Pennsylvania could just plain not ask voters for the identification the state's controversial law requires.
It's impossible to predict whether other election workers will follow Broach and exploit the fact that Republican Gov. Tom Corbett must rely on thousands of fair-minded citizens, including some rank-and-file Republicans, to implement voter ID.
But if they do, election workers could be prosecuted.
The voter ID law does not set out any new and specific penalties for non-compliance. Violators could, however, be charged under five catch-all state elections code provisions, according to information provided by the Secretary of State to the Philadelphia City Commissioners and obtained by City Paper. That includes two felonies carrying prison sentences of up to seven years. Anyone convicted of such a crime would also be barred from voting for four years.
It's impossible to predict whether the Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams or the Pennsylvania Attorney General, who both have jurisdiction over such matters, would prosecute offenders or what charges they would press. Williams office said, however, that it would take voter ID violations seriously.
“We generally assign 60 to 65 [Assistant District Attorneys] ADAs to election-day duty, and we will do the same this November,” DA spokeswoman Tasha Jamerson wrote in an e-mail to CP. “The law is the law, and we will look at alleged violations in the same manner as any other election-day complaints we receive.”
Jamerson, however, only cited a possible misdemeanor charge carrying a one-year maximum sentence, and not the seven-year sentences referenced by the Secretary of State.
And since the judge of elections, and not the other four election officers, is ultimately responsible for running any given polling place, an inspector of elections like Broach failing to ask for ID might not face any consequence ― legal or otherwise.
“People could go to jail,” says Gregory M. Harvey, an elections lawyer at Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads, LLP, who is also a Democratic committeeman in the 8th ward. “It's extraordinarily rare that people go to jail for violation of the election code but it occasionally happens.”
The office of Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda L. Kelly did not respond to a request for comment.
If workers at hundreds of polling places ― particularly those in Philadelphia, Allentown, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and other urban centers ― joined together to flout the law, it would unquestionably provoke confusion. It could also prompt a political crisis if the Attorney General chose to prosecute primarily Democratic election workers. (Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda L. Kelly, said that he would "not speculate about hypothetical situations.") And election worker resistance to voter ID would no doubt prompt Fox News hysterics over alleged Philadelphia fraud like the 2008 New Black Panther Party media fiasco.
Whatever election workers do, however, the votes that citizens cast would probably be safe.
“It would be highly unlikely for the votes to be thrown out," according to a representative of the Pennsylvania ACLU, because "there is no legal basis for doing so.”
Ellen Kaplan of the good-government group Committee of Seventy, which opposed voter ID legislation, says that City Commissioners should ensure that all election workers are prepared to carry out the law.
“I would say that anybody who announces in advance that he or she will not ask for voter ID, that the City Commissioners make sure that somebody else on the election board ask for ID.”
There might be chaos at the polls regardless. Inspecting IDs could prove time-consuming and cause long lines. And though City Commissioners are dedicated to training election workers to implement the new law, confusion as to what forms of ID are acceptable ― confusion that Governor Corbett seems to share ― could make a serious real-time mess.
The courts are the last opportunity to prevent this disorder.
The ACLU and other rights groups are currently challenging the law in Commonwealth Court, contending that it violates the state constitution's protection of the right to vote. That decision, expected by mid-August, will almost certainly be appealed to a state Supreme Court divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, because Republican Joan Orie Melvin was suspended after being charged with corruption (her sister, former state Sen. Jane Orie, is already behind bars). A tied 3-3 vote by the Supreme Court would automatically affirm the Commonwealth Court's ruling against the law.
Lax fracking rules overturned by court, local zoning powers restored
Tom Corbett is taking a beating in the court of public opinion: a new poll finds that just 32-percent of Pennsylvanians approve of the governor, with 49 disapproving. Meanwhile, Corbett's campaign to pillage the public good just suffered a critical setback in an actual court of law.
Though conservatives like to preach about empowering individuals against the encroachment of big government, the rhetoric is often just cover for turning over power to major corporations. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more obvious than with Pennsylvania's new natural gas law, which bars localities from regulating natural gas drilling taking place in their towns and counties sitting atop the Marcellus Shale.
And last week, a Commonwealth Court panel declared the provisions of the natural gas law allowing drilling companies to “override local zoning and environmental laws” unconstitutional in a 4-3 ruling.
Act 13 finally implemented an “impact fee” on natural gas drilling (still one of the lowest such taxes nationwide). And it also stripped local governments of the right to control how and where that fracking, which is dramatically remaking vast swaths of rural Pennsylvania, takes place.
Corbett has announced that he will appeal the decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which, again, is currently split between three Republicans and three Democrats. But the fight is not so much partisan as it is a fight between local elected officials and the state government, says Bruce Ledewitz, professor at Duquesne Law and an expert on the Pennsylvania constitution.
Ledewitz was surprised by the Commonwealth Court ruling. He believes that Act 13 is bad policy but thinks it is constitutional.
“I think it's likely that the state Supreme Court will disagree. But this is uncharted territory.”
The lawmakers, elected officials and environmentalists who challenged the law celebrated the ruling.
“Environmentally, this new law seems almost designed to repeat the devastation left by the coal barons 100 years ago,” said state Rep. Tim Briggs (D-Montgomery), one of 30 House Democrats who filed a brief supporting the law's challengers. “It essentially placed the environmental health of the entire state into the hands of industrial gas drillers.”
Widespread cheating inflated Pennsylvania standardized test scores, Inquirer finds
“After authorities imposed unprecedented security measures on the 2012 statewide exams, test scores tumbled across Pennsylvania,” the Inquirer reported on Sunday.
Why the increased scrutiny? The Inquirer first uncovered potential cheating at Roosevelt Middle School in May 2011. One month later, The Philadelphia Public School Notebook uncovered a 2009 state study that found 89 schools statewide, including 28 in Philly, had been identified for suspicious test scores.
The Pennsylvania high-stakes test cheating scandal is part of a nationwide epidemic.
As I reported for Salon, “The full extent of cheating nationwide is hard to gauge. In both Atlanta and Philadelphia, it was aggressive reporting and not government oversight that brought bubble-test malfeasance to light. There is often little government regulation at the state or school district level. And the federal government, for its part, requires testing but does not require any oversight to identify cheating.”
What the Inquirer (like much of the mainstream media) does not do a very good job of doing, however, is putting this, story-by-story, in a helpful context for readers. Why exactly have there been rampant high-stakes standardized test cheating scandals nationwide? Because President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind and then President Barack Obama's Race to the Top have increased the stakes of standardized testing to the point where a school's very survival or a teacher's job is increasingly defined by the outcome of these tests.
The response to cheating scandals has so far been to increase test security. Elected officials should instead ponder whether the high-stakes testing regime―which has increasingly squeezed literature, history, physical education, science and even recess out of schools―is a good way to ensure that children are delivered a rich and high-quality education.
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