If Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson “upholds a new Pennsylvania election law at the end of this month and the decision survives appeal, hundreds of thousands of voters, most of them Democrats, may be disenfranchised,” wrotes Alter in Bloomberg. “That, in turn, could put Pennsylvania, once considered a blue state, into the Romney column and swing the election.”
Aparently Alter doesn’t pay much attention to Pennsylvania politics however since there’s been a lot of discussion of Pennsylvania’s importance this year, but not because of the new ID law.
Pennsylvanians went very hard for Republicans just two years ago, electing Sen. Pat Toomey to replace Democrat Arlen Specter as well as numerous Congressional seats that went to the GOP not to mention the governorship changing hands to Republican Tom Corbett as well as both legislative houses in Harrisburg.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania was the site of the worst example of voter intimidation in 2008, when a new Black Panther Party member was videotaped in front of a polling station in Philadelphia brandishing a billy club and threatening voters. The federal government even brought suit and won, except that Eric Holder’s Justice Department droped the case. This is the same Attorney General who is now claiming that all voterr ID laws are equivalent to poll taxes in their efforts to disenfranchise minority and eldery voters.
Alter at least has the decency to point out that Holder couldn’t make that claim in Pennsylvania because getting a valid photo ID is free.
“I tend to think the effect of voter id will be lost in the shuffle of all the other factors that will affect who will be the next president,” said Nathaniel Persily, a voting law expert at Columbia Law School. “There is fraud and there is some voter impersonation fraud but you’re trying to kill a fly with a bazooka with these kinds of laws.”